Alliance Requirements for Deterrence: Capabilities and Options for the Next Decade

by Paul Schulte

This paper considers contradictions between Alliance strategic cultures and underlying strategic realities, and how they might be better reconciled in the interests of improving—or simply maintaining—NATO deterrence. It does not pretend that deterrence is the only perspective from which to view Alliance security, but it does argue that there is a logic of deterrence with consistent policy implications that should not simply be glossed over. It also assumes that there is a moral as well as an intellectual obligation to consider, very seriously, deterrence as a responsible strategy which can prevent reckless aggression and avoidable spirals of conflict.

Definitions

In this paper deterrence is defined as “a coercive strategy involving the potential or actual application of force to influence the actions of others by seeking to discourage or restrain them from acting through considerations of danger, cost and risk.”[1]

Although it is a boundary-setting activity which seldom occurs alone, but as part of a wider mix of messages of reassurance, conciliation and outreach, deterrence should be distinguished within that mixture from associated or parallel consensual persuasive strategies which (if they could be achieved) would involve the adjustment of strategic choices by others without the threat of force or other penalties.

Strategic Cultural Context

Serious discussion of deterrence is currently an unnatural conversation throughout most of NATO. The underlying reasons for this are complex. But they have to do with the strategic culture which has developed within Alliance member states.[2]

These cultures are increasingly cautious, commendably humanitarian, but with little desire to consider the implications of worst-case security outcomes and of entirely foreseeable collisions of global power interests. Unkind, usually American, observers say that this attitude amounts to requesting an exemption from History. Indeed Raymond Aron wrote as early as the 1970s that ‘‘Europeans would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood. Others, by their hundreds of millions, wish to enter it.”[3] That aphorism describes the present situation even more aptly, although the yearning is not entirely confined to Europeans. The majority of Alliance citizens would prefer their governments to banish risk by creative use of soft power rather than contain or deter it by harder strategic capabilities or intentions. Millions would rather their representatives concentrated on climate change, world poverty or the credit crunch than potential military risks.

Current and Recurrent Objections to Deterrence

Furthering this public mood are arguments from politicians, diplomats, scholars and activists against an overdependence upon deterrence which overlap with a moral critique of deterrence itself, at least as practised by powerful and well-armed Western states.

Critics variously allege that deterrence:

• Accentuates distrust between nations;
• Promotes militarism within them;
  • Is endless, and endlessly expensive, and benefits military-industrial complexes at the expense of real human welfare; and
  • Is subject to strategic misunderstanding, through recurrent , quite identifiable, mechanisms of human error such as misperception, worst-case thinking, poor strategic communication, mirror imaging, group think, and perserveration (i.e. insisting on maintaining a policy direction when there is accumulating evidence that it would be imprudent to do so).
  • Because of this proneness to error, critics argue, deterrence can never be risk-free and must, statistically, therefore eventually tip over into disaster—as the supreme statistician McNamara reiterated to the very end of his life.
  • Deterrence presents risks such as misuse for reasons of domestic political popularity, and hijacking by populists or ideological extremists.
  • Deterrence can lead to repetitive wars of reputation. ”For a great nation there are no small conflicts,” as Lord Palmerston said, referring to a tiny revolt in Canada in 1837. Or, as Thomas Schelling put it in the 1960s, “Face is one of the few things worth fighting over." This raises the theoretical prospect of repeated conflicts to restore deterrence, such as Israel in Lebanon in 2006;
  • Deterrence produces hostile and distrustful relationships, which the U.S. government, for example, explicitly judges undesirable with major powers such as Russia and China.
  • A strongly emphasised deterrent posture, when signalled by a global military hegemon and its partners, might begin to look threateningly coercive, especially when supplemented with missile defences.
  • For the United States and its NATO partners to overstress deterrence risks undermining international institutions and regimes to the extent that they are seen to be providing security essentially for themselves, independently of the UN Security Council’s authority, and de-linked from enforcement of wider global norms.
  • It would set a bad example, the critics further assert, for the richest and collectively overwhelmingly most powerful nations in the world to overemphasise deterrence, especially by nuclear means, when their own overall strategic situation is so favourable.
  • Maintaining unyielding deterrence against current, or non-existent but indefinitely imaginable, opponents can only be achieved at the expense of disarmament.
  • Failure to secure wider nuclear disarmament, the critics conclude, increases the risk of the further progressive failure of the non-proliferation regime—which would, in turn, lead to a multiplication of nuclear deterrence relationships in places and with institutions, leaders, and forces which may be far less stable than those which the NATO Alliance has had to envisage to date.

In general, for the Alliance in its current circumstances, a revised communicative emphasis on deterrence risks provoking accusations of being too much for its rather large surrounding neighborhood, because its aggregates of strength are too huge, undiscriminating and difficult to tailor.

There is consequently a growing uncertainty about what can be said to Alliance publics without disproportionate political cost and embarrassment to member governments, especially those composed of fragile coalitions. The effect has been strengthened by the long-term tendency for publics and the media to assume that deterrence concerns only nuclear strategy, coupled with an understandable recent presentational overemphasis by governments on terrorism, which most ordinary people would probably therefore now define as the most serious threat facing the Alliance. This has decreased public willingness to consider the importance of averting war, blackmail or crisis between states.

As a consequence, specialist analyses of deterrence differ so much from standard political discourse in each of the NATO countries that they may have to be translated into words which are less precise and more comforting. The work at NATO Headquarters on the new Strategic Concept announced at the Strasbourg-Kehl Summit in April 2009 will inevitably involve locating and working around the various special, perhaps show-stopping, national sensitivities in this regard. An Alliance of 28 members embodies a great many taboos. The eventual document will therefore have to be a masterful work of multilingual translation—and perhaps euphemism. In some areas circumlocution and tortured diplomatic formulas may be permissible; in others, precision could be essential. If there are to be trade-offs of deterrence against other policy considerations, it would be very desirable to set out scrupulously the extent and source of the expected gains from the trade.

Living in Year One

One might describe the present political conjunction as Year One AB (“After Bush”). The former U.S. Administration is now reviled for having overestimated the utility of military force. By contrast, NATO electorates see President Obama as an agent of profound change, committed to reducing military threats and confrontation. Major transformations are expected. His April 2009 Prague speech created many rhapsodic expectations about the achievability of global nuclear disarmament. Yet, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the Obama Presidency, two complete presidential terms may be unable to eliminate the most serious threats to international security, which now seem to lie in nuclear proliferation.

If diplomacy fails to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons to Iran or elsewhere, and the use of force is also to be avoided, the unavoidable third option will be indefinite deterrence and containment in a world with nuclear weapons—as the President has cautiously said that it may remain for the rest of his lifetime. That may be the reality not only in relation to Iran but in various other crosscutting strategic relationships, should Iranian intransigence release a cascade of further nuclear proliferation.

This is the contradictory context, where strategic cultural expectations contrast with intractable security disputes, in which NATO will have to construct its new Strategic Concept. It is understandable that the Alliance took the decision to launch this project. Its leaders have to reinterpret to their electorates the purpose of the Alliance in new times if it is to remain relevant and convincing to them, and therefore cohesive and resilient.

But there are all too predictable presentational problems:

• Discussing Options involves considering theatres of operations, military choices and therefore at least approximate identification of possible opponents.
• Discussing Capabilities, while easier in some ways, still involves costs, which will conflict painfully with domestic priorities. How can NATO governments justify these costs without frightening and antagonizing voters?

So transparent public discussion and consensus building will be difficult. The problem is not just a strategic one of reconciling political and military factors and trying to reconnect different strategic levels with a positive balance for each. It also requires developing a sufficiently compelling and accurate set of public formulations which can give adequate strategic guidance by addressing the most difficult and controversial issues, yet which is not excessively politically costly and divisive in its impact across the 28 NATO nations.

Public Requirements for the Alliance's Strategic Conversation

One particular semantic consideration will be important here. It would be undesirable to give any suggestion of planning to deter evil, which would take the debate in unnecessarily controversial directions and would be rejected by large sections of NATO's various publics.

The Alliance's conversation with itself has to take into account opponents who would consider harming us not because they are intrinsically wicked, or because they hate us—though some might—but for historically quite normal motives such as increasing relative national power, mistakenly reacting to misperceived signals, courting domestic political popularity, reversing historic wrongs, or advancing a sanctified national, cultural or religious cause.

That dispassionate long-term deterrent perspective, necessary to remain prudently engaged with history, inevitably involves many  "mights." As a result incautiously worded public statements which might be based on it could backfire rhetorically in the current mood and easily lend themselves to mockery or denunciation as the "Rent-a-Threat" thinking of “securicrats.” Strategic studies specialists have to believe that decision-makers cannot responsibly avoid hedging against future worst case mights. But ordinary citizens can, and some successful political leaders often do, disregard this responsibility. The subject matter of this paper is unnatural because the populations of NATO nations strongly prefer to think of peace. They do not wish to live, and therefore wish to avoid thinking about living, under the dangerous shadows of severely destructive conventional or nuclear war or even intense terrorist attack.

But, for specialists and officials concerned with Alliance security, the less comfortable requirement is for hard collective thinking, careful planning, and appropriate procurement and training, coupled with sophisticated political signaling aimed at showing that NATO is clearly willing and able to thwart and, if necessary, punish other actors in the international system, whether states or non-state groups, which might otherwise find it expedient to do harm to one or more of the 28 NATO Allies.

Alliance Deterrence: Ideally Unified Vision and Presently Disconnected Reality

What overall policy and communications outcome should these efforts ideally aim at? The following formulation of a satisfactory end state will by definition never be completely achievable but its requirements can sharpen analysis:

“a widely agreed and well communicated menu of civil and military responses to possible state and non-state aggression, including new technological threats, and covert challenges below Article 5 levels, which would in aggregate promise to be:

• • credible,
  • proportionate,
  • discriminating,
  • effective, and
  • legal.”

If this agenda were successfully developed and determinedly maintained, it would provide a deeply stabilising and cooling antidote to our current situation, in which we risk having Disconnectedly Stratified Deterrence, with significant separation between the following levels:

1. Nuclear: These capabilities are politically, symbolically and, in crises, nationally and psychologically important. Adjustments in nuclear forces are generally slow in technical and numerical terms, unless there are radical cuts. Nuclear deterrence requirements are subject to radical change by the appearance of new nuclear-capable states, although these might be mitigated to an uncertain degree by missile defenses within the Alliance.
2. High-End Conventional: These capabilities include armored divisions, air wings, submarines and aircraft carriers. In NATO terms the likely overall military balances are satisfactory but there remain suspicions about the Alliance’s political commitment to the conventional defense of the territory of the newest, most peripheral, and therefore most exposed members—or, still more, to the costly and forceful ejection of aggression.
3. Unconventional, non-military, and “jagged" threats, including internal and cross-border tensions and conflict involving nonstate actors: Fast moving and unpredictable developments, like magma bubbling below the other strategic strata, could involve rogue states, international terrorism and great power adventurism and probing. Murky and ambiguous possibilities could draw in a variety of obscure and unfamiliar decision-makers.

"Jagged Threats" and Necessary Deterrent Remedies

Serious consideration of this last category suggests that the Alliance should modify and expand its focus to look at the increasingly important sub-military components of deterrence. That should not detract or distract from the case for nuclear or conventional military deterrence but ought to embed them in an integrated Alliance Vision for security. NATO needs to be able to deter not only, or even predominantly, cross border military attacks or nuclear strikes, but also less tangible, more insidious threats and risks. If, despite accounting for around 67 percent of the world’s military expenditure,[4] an alliance of over 800 million rich and exceptionally well armed people can find no deterrent remedies for these new threats, the Allies risk losing confidence in the usefulness of the island of collective defense they have constructed from the maelstrom of twentieth-century history and the sense of mutual obligation it requires and justifies.

Actors too weak or too cautious to threaten NATO with overt conventional attack may employ jagged methods of assertion. This category of deterrable risk involves an unpredictable variety of pressures, constraints and challenges, sometimes anonymous, unattributable, uncertain or disputed (possibly thrown up by Mother Nature like swine flu— or, in future, quite possibly not). They could result from decisions by unsympathetic governments, or allegedly independent state owned agencies, and they might be justified by alleged economic or technical necessity, or health risks.

Jagged assertion might take place in, or concertedly across, a number of environments, including entirely new technological domains.[5]

• In space, where satellites are increasingly crucial, for civil as well as military applications, but might be jammed, blinded or even destroyed without any other terrestrial military aggression;
• In cyberspace, where national economies can be brought to a halt by anonymous hackers and massive denial of service attacks and where some Alliance members have already experienced cyber bombardments;
• Within civil society and public opinion through externally directed riots and civil disorder, as took place recently in Estonia;
• In the energy sector, through stoppages and cut-offs, a sector in which the NATO Allies are all uneasily aware of the dependencies which they are continually accumulating through hydrocarbon imports;
• At sea, which might involve scenarios as different as:
  • Piracy in unpoliced Third World waters, where naval forces entirely militarily capable of protecting the sea lanes are “self-deterred” from taking forceful action by legal considerations;
  • Menacing naval manoeuvres off the coasts of Europe; or
  • Rough games of flag-waving naval “chicken” in the High North as the Arctic ice sheet melts and various littoral countries assert their claims; and
• Within the human terrain of our societies, by selectively permitted or actively manipulated human flows of economic migrants or alleged refugees.

Jagged assertion could also take place through terrorism. Despite the endless attention to this issue since 9/11, the NATO Allies are far from any authoritative indication of red lines. Deterrence theory would suggest that it would be a stabilizing development to convey clear and firm messages. What degree of evidence or scale of uncovered plots and intended terrorist attacks should trigger NATO responses by military, economic or political punishment for sponsorship or tolerance by hostile or deliberately negligent regimes?

What would happen if Canada or one of the European Allies were to suffer an assault of the magnitude of the World Trade Center or Mumbai attacks, or a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) incident? (The United States has its new expanded retaliatory policy but this points up the gap with other allied doctrines.) What should be the proper collective response to a number of small scale, deliberately non-catastrophic terror attacks, perhaps using chemical, biological or radiological materials, to terrify NATO populations and build up habituated expectations of future threats connected with Alliance decisions? Or, as an increasingly imaginable terrorist scenario, what should the Alliance do if one or more of its members begins to suffer frequent small-scale missile attacks, like those which repeatedly struck Israel from Gaza?

It is essential that the Alliance think through and work hard on agreeing, preparing and, as far as possible, signaling responses well in advance to this proliferating category of challenges. If it becomes evident that NATO is failing to prepare itself to cope with such jagged threats, member states may make other accommodations, while widening public disillusionment could wear away belief in the utility of the Alliance—and correspondingly dissolve the external credibility of its will to defend itself.

New and Wider Deterrent Options

We therefore need wider spectrums and smoother gradations of deterrent plans and capabilities. Some might have to be entirely new and innovative. Others are already beginning to be introduced. The possibilities include:

• More convincingly combined and determined diplomatic pressures;
• More reliably concerted economic measures, like retaliatory sanctions, including prolonged and shared disinvestment;
• Cyber protective or retaliatory responses;
• Fall back plans for replacing and sharing space assets;
• Coordinated medical preparations and stockpiles;
• Demonstrations of solidarity with exposed allies on the Alliance’s periphery (which one might think of as NATO's geopolitical “Hemland”), as with the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE) set up in Estonia;
• The evident capability and plausible will to launch conventional interventions to block attacks by—or to punish—recklessly aggressive hostile regimes; and
• Legal initiatives which would begin to extricate policymakers from the expanding thicket of judge-made international law.

The Public Case for Reintegrating Deterrence

The connection between remedies against jagged threats and conventional or nuclear deterrence needs to be communicated more effectively. A publicly successful argument would need to be carefully refined, but might, in essence, run like this:

1. The Alliance needs to develop deterrent responses to emergent, unconventional or jagged threats in order to be able to protect its security interests.
2. Allies cannot reasonably expect self declaredly hostile or competitor nations with a burning sense of historical grievance, military encirclement, or religious entitlement, to accept being thwarted in their jagged assertion efforts without at least threatening some quite possibly unspecified kind of military response.
3. If there is a possibility of military conflict, the Allies cannot reasonably expect opponents, whoever they might be, to accept the prospect of tidy conventional defeat, without at least threatening escalation to use of WMD, if they have them (or perhaps even if they don't).
4. To deter such threats the Allies need not just capable and usable conventional forces, but, at the anxiety provoking top end, convincing nuclear capabilities, including those in the long-established sharing arrangements under NATO auspices.
5. For this, numbers, assured penetration, and weapon yield matter, but not as much as demonstrably cohesive will power. These are, after all, as the Allies have frequently stated, political weapons.

Missile Defense in Europe

Missile defense in Europe could help to preserve and enhance that willpower across the Alliance. A European interceptor site should foster more determination in a crisis with a small nuclear power because it would offer the realistic prospect that the ballistic missile would not always get through. Therefore the enhanced psychological reassurance of Alliance publics should further enhance deterrence.

But the extent of this contribution may depend on the quality of advocacy, tactical handling and political leadership. In purely deterrence terms, there is a significant risk that, if mishandled, disputes over installing missile defenses for the protection of Allied territory and populations outside the United States could use up more political capital and strategic determination than the missile defenses would create or conserve.

The Impact of Arms Control on Alliance Nuclear Deterrence

Western publics, especially in this Year One AB, will demand that NATO governments be seen to be contributing positively to progress in arms control and nuclear non-proliferation. Even from a deterrence standpoint there would be no point in resisting this. The alternative would be to risk bitter intra-alliance political divisions which would reduce the political cohesion desirable to deter reckless challengers. So NATO will continue to make supportive statements and to examine its own requirements. It should especially contribute money and technical expertise for devising verification modalities—the predictable devil which will haunt any deep or long-term progress.

But each specific arms-control proposal will need to be carefully examined. This is perhaps where strategists can come out of their disciplinary closet and engage—or contribute to better informed speeches for others to do so. Articulate analysis of these issues gives specialists a small but worthwhile chance to affect the development of the national strategic cultures within the Alliance.

Experts should therefore at least ask questions such as the following:

• How would a specific disarmament proposal actually work to move the whole world—not just the small Circle of the Virtuous—closer to zero?
• Does the proposal in question require a leap of faith, starting the Alliance on a lone expedition towards the elusive summit of nuclear abolition, towards a base camp from which it could not easily withdraw if the international weather deteriorated?
• Would the combination of possible disarmament proposals risk unravelling the Alliance (which would be a disaster, given European propensities for distrust and rivalry)?
• On the issue of the “200 to 300"[6] U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe permitting nuclear burden sharing by European Allies operating the necessary dual capable aircraft, it is necessary to ask determinedly, what alternatives might be better than the present system?

It is now clear that at the May 2010 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), some of the non-nuclear weapon states will press strongly for the abolition of this carefully developed NATO arrangement, which was established well before the conclusion of the NPT. The analysis of disarmament options therefore needs to go beyond the strategic level to encompass the political, psychological, and ethical implications. A proper concern for the maintenance of deterrence would require an adequate answer to the following questions:

• What other modalities could improve, or even equal, the sharing of political commitments and practical nuclear responsibilities among the NATO Allies in the current arrangements?
• In terms of deterrence, which other arrangement could be more operationally stable in a crisis than a system of nuclear burden sharing which, because it would depend upon the achievement of an Alliance consensus, could never in practice be used for a preemptive surprise first strike?
• Is it likely that increasing the nuclear dependence of the European Allies on the United States by doing away with current nuclear risk- and responsibility-sharing arrangements would enhance European willingness to develop and maintain expeditionary military capabilities which could be used for global benefit?
• Why exactly should the European Allies signal that they now expect to shift the nuclear deterrent responsibility further on to the United States, implying that they themselves decline to support a jointly-maintained capability that has become distasteful to nuclear disarmament proponents?
• Can only the Americans, in the last resort, be expected to take the political and moral responsibility of maintaining the Alliance’s nuclear posture and making potential nuclear use decisions?

On non-strategic nuclear weapons, on which the 25 non-nuclear-weapon state NATO Allies will have a chance to express their views, the following, rather significant, points need to be made in a public discussion which has tended to ignore them. First, there are no promising publicly announced technical means to count, track or verify these weapons. Secondly, there is little dispute that several thousands of them continue to exist beyond NATO borders across Eurasia. A recent estimate published by the Federation of American Scientists put the Russian total for such weapons at around 5,000, of which about 2,000 may currently be deployed.[7]

These inconveniently Realist truths, if voiced effectively enough, may set limits on how far the European Allies would feel their security enhanced by any rapid draw down, withdrawal or abolition of Western nuclear systems, whether strategic or non-strategic. The cruise and Pershing missile crisis in the 1980s showed that NATO leaders were prepared in the comparatively recent past to risk major civil disorders because they feared the long-term political and security consequences for Alliance nations of living with a gross disparity of short and intermediate range nuclear systems, despite the U.S. strategic umbrella. Are there convincing arguments which would indicate that this was an entirely quaint twentieth-century concern that has been overtaken by events?

Conclusions: Deterrence and Wider Requirements

Beyond doctrines, concepts and force structures, the Alliance needs:

a. To be certain within its government and official structures, and to be able to convince its publics, that deterrence is not being privileged at the expense of real possibilities of rapprochement and political agreement with potential opponents which could deliver satisfactory consensual solutions to international tensions.

b. Specifically, to prove that examining and strengthening deterrent capabilities and policies will not in itself obstruct current Western efforts to promote global movement in the direction of disarmament.

c. To ensure, by a continuous process of analysis and internal agreement, and then prove, as discussed above, that there is a well thought out and effectively planned interconnection between all relevant levels of deterrence. This means, in practice, that the Alliance will commit itself to go through the painful necessary choices to remain relevant. That process should certainly involve a considerable improvement in the prediction, analysis and planning of appropriate deterrent responses to new and jagged threats.

d. To demonstrate that it is prepared to move towards transformational change in the nuclear field if wider global intentions and achievable non-proliferation outcomes justify it, but to remain appropriately cautious in sacrificing capabilities which could not easily be restored.

e. To ensure that opinion makers and decision-makers are sensibly conscious of all the deterrent implications of proposed Alliance contributions to disarmament which might further increase transatlantic disparities in responsibilities, capabilities, and commitments . Apart from accentuating other intra-alliance tensions, as over relative defence expenditures, a decision to terminate the nuclear-sharing arrangements based on U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe could be expected, over time, to reduce the overall credibility of the deterrence which NATO could exert, by undermining its cohesion and making it less and less a community of shared security responsibilities-—or, to use the invaluable German term: a “Schicksalgemeinschaft”: a shared community of fate .

f. To become more systematic in determining which strategic arguments can be most convincingly put to sceptical Alliance electorates, individually and collectively . The issues are surely important enough to justify polling and focus group budgets as large as those used to market soap powder in the private sector and to communicate safety regulations in the public sector.

g. To ensure that deterrence is as tailored as possible (which is almost a definitional requirement for maximizing its effectiveness) once a potentially threatening antagonist begins to emerge, but to appreciate that "tailoring" in itself offers no magic solution. To the extent that it represents a departure from long accepted practice "tailoring" will certainly require the maintenance of an expensive intelligence knowledge base on a wide range of other international actors, but there will remain serious inherent uncertainties about motivations, perceptions and precise power relationships within states or groups which the Alliance may in future need to deter.

 About the Author

Paul Schulte is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, in the War Studies Department of King's College, London, and in the Research and Assessment Branch of the UK Defence Academy. His government positions included Director of Proliferation and Arms Control, Chief Speech Writer for the Secretary of State in the UK Defence Ministry, UK Commissioner on the UN Commissions for Iraqi Disarmament (UNSCOM and UNMOVIC), the Ministry of Defence desk officer for defense commitments in the Middle East, Director of Defence Organisation in the Coalition Provisional Authority for Iraq, and the first Head of the UK's interdepartmental Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit. The views expressed are his own.

 References

1. This definition is based on the one developed in Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge, England, and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2004).

2. Strategic culture may be defined as “a distinctive body of beliefs, attitudes and practices regarding the use of force, held by a collective and arising gradually over time through a unique protracted historical process.” Kerry Longhurst, Germany and the Use of Force (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 17.

3. Raymond Aron, as quoted in Christopher Caldwell, “Fear Masquerading As Tolerance,” Prospect Magazine, no. 158 (May 2009).

4. Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2009 (London: Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2009), 452.

5. Several of the concerns raised here, about potentially threatened access to the global commons of sea, air, space, and cyberspace, overlap with those recently expressed by Michele Flournoy and Shawn Brimley in their influential article, “The Contested Global Commons,” in The Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, 135, no. 7 (July 2009). One of the major conclusions of this article is directly compatible with an emphasis on Alliance deterrence: “Far more than a military matter, stability and security in space and cyberspace will depend on working with our allies and partners to develop a common framework and advance international norms that can shape the choices and behavior of others.” This also serves as a useful reminder that effective planning to uphold Alliance interests against new threats is likely to contribute to global solutions as well.

6. “Editorial: Watershed Moment on Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, 25 March 2009.

7. See the table in Hans M. Kristensen, “Russian Tactical Nuclear Weapons,” Federation of American Scientists Security Blog.