Numerology in the Second Nuclear Age
The nuclear numbers game has changed. During the Cold War, deterrence strategists claimed that the nuclear balance mattered, even at extraordinarily high numbers. By this musty logic, the United States now has more deterrence leverage against Russia than at any time since the Soviet nuclear build-up in the 1960s. This paper contends that nuclear "numerology", centered around "prompt hard-target kill" capabilities and nuclear exchange ratios, provides extremely modest political leverage. The “delicate balance of terror” that Western deterrence strategists worried about so obsessively during the Cold War now sounds like the laments of an ancient, interred religion. New nuclear dangers are now reducible by cooperative threat reduction initiatives rather than by increasing warheads, yields, and throw-weights.
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Numerology in the Second Nuclear Age
Security Studies Center
Heir to a tradition dating back to the founding of Ifri, the Security Studies Center provides public and private decision-makers as well as the general public with the keys to understanding power relations and contemporary modes of conflict as well as those to come. Through its positioning at the juncture of politics and operations, the credibility of its civil-military team and the wide distribution of its publications in French and English, the Center for Security Studies constitutes in the French landscape of think tanks a unique center of research and influence on the national and international defense debate.
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