Deterrence Its Past and Future—Papers Presented at Hoover Institution, November 2010

Drawn from the third in a series of conferences at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University on the nuclear legacy of the cold war, this report examines the importance of deterrence, from its critical function in the cold war to its current role. Although deterrence will not disappear, current and future threats to international security will present relatively fewer situations in which nuclear weapons will play the dominant role they did during the cold war. The authors highlight the ways in which deterrence has been shaped by surrounding conditions and circumstances. They look at the prospective reliability of deterrence as a tool of statecraft in the emerging international environment. And they examine the challenges of ;weaponless deterrence ;: developing approaches to nuclear deterrence that rely not on the actua,but rather on the potentialexistence of nuclear weapons. In addition, they look at the ongoing debates over ;de-alerting ; (slowing down the capability for immediate launch and rapid nuclear escalation), the role of arms control, and the practical considerations related to verification and compliance.

George P. Shultz is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and has had a distinguished career in government, in academia, and in business. He lives in San Francisco. Sidney D. Drell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of theoretical physics emeritus at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University. He lives in Palo Alto, California. James E. Goodby is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow with the Center for Northeast Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. He lives in San Jose, California.