Old School Deterrence

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The Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson has an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists describing the U.S. Evangelical movement's push to eliminate nuclear weapons from the world. It's worth reading, but this part jumped out at me:

The shift in nuclear paradigms from the Cold War to the post-9/11 era will of course be well-known to Bulletin readers. The new view, articulated in varied ways by the Shultz foursome and the Global Zero coalition--and, most recently/significantly by presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev--recognizes that traditional deterrence is obsolete in the age of asymmetric warfare, that nonproliferation is no longer credible unless yoked with a serious commitment to disarmament, and that the alternative to a nonproliferation-disarmament agenda is eventual proliferation leading someday to the use of a nuclear weapon, whether by accident or design. [emphasis mine]

The problem here is that we're not living in an age of asymmertric warfare, at least, not exclusively. We also live in an age of rising nuclear powers and all of those powers will most definitely be susceptible to "traditional deterrence." It's hard to see how, in the years ahead, nuclear weapons won't continue to play a vital role in ensuring that those powers do not wage war on one another, or us.

That's not to say that these arsenals can't be pared back. But presuming that old school deterrence is dead strikes me as very misguided. I suspect it has a very large role to play vis-a-vis Iran in the coming years.

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