Alex WellersteinVerified account

I think everybody who studies this seriously knows that deterrence, by itself, is not the only game in town for nuclear non-use. But it is also very hard to prove a null result.

I mean, can one really prove in a meaningful sense that a fear of reprisal did or did not play into why the US and USSR did not escalate into a hostile war? This is necessarily counter-factual in nature.

We do have evidence that several world leaders, esp. in tense times, did take into account the fear of widespread nuclear war. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev feared it during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that did dictate some of their actions. This is pretty easy to document.

I mean, even Barash acknowledges that the US and USSR didn't go to war because "neither side wanted to go to war" — a bit tautological, but given that both sides were well aware of the consequences of nuclear exchange, how is that mutually exclusive with deterrence?

And the claim that nuclear weapons deterred ALL wars is a straw man if ever there was one. The Cold War is called that not because all wars were averted but because *direct* conflict between superpowers was averted.