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The key structure of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is audible in the September 4, 2024, speech by U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Cara Abercrombie: “Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.” The doctrine, which the United States has embraced since the Cold War, aims to prevent an adversary from launching a nuclear weapon by assuring that any first strike will be followed by a retaliatory second strike, whose effects will equal or exceed the original damage and may eliminate the adversary altogether. This annihilating reflex of deterrence is equally audible in the quiet words of the Department of Defense in its web page on “America’s Nuclear Triad,” its sea-based, land-based, and air-based delivery platforms: “The triad, along with assigned forces, provide 24/7 deterrence to prevent catastrophic actions from our adversaries and they stand ready, if necessary, to deliver a decisive response, anywhere, anytime.”

Framed wholly as defensive and preventative (and from day to day, largely successful in deflecting our attention from the actual first use stance the country has had for nearly eighty years), deterrence would almost have the aura of peacekeeping, were it not the mental platform undergirding our fourteen Ohio-class submarines (each able to singlehandedly destroy one of Earth’s seven continents), four hundred land-based ICBMs, and sixty-six B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers. Although the physical act of unbuilding the nuclear architecture is easily within reach—it would take at most four weeks to dismantle all the nuclear triggers throughout the world, a decisive because disabling first step—the mental architecture of deterrence is the major impediment to doing so.

One of the fiercest critics of nuclear deterrence is the former commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, General Lee Butler. While serving in that role, Butler simultaneously served as Director of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, overseeing the selection and coordination of twelve thousand nuclear targets. In the year the Berlin Wall fell, he became the director for strategic plans and policy in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Butler could be crowing about the roles he had in overseeing the country’s nuclear deterrence in the twentieth century. Instead, from the deep interior of our country’s nuclear architecture, he has for decades denounced both the practice and theory of nuclear deterrence.

In a 1996 address to the National Press Club, General Butler called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. He repeated that call in a speech before the National Press Club in 1998 where he outlined the strategic and moral failings of deterrence, and he elaborated those failings in his 2016 two-volume memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention. Here is Butler’s overview of nuclear deterrence:

Appropriated from the lexicon of conventional warfare, this simple prescription for adequate military preparedness became in the nuclear age a formula for potential catastrophe. [Deterrence is] premised on a litany of unwarranted assumptions, unprovable assertions and logical contradictions.

Butler’s 1996 call for the elimination of nuclear weapons had been swiftly endorsed by sixty retired U. S. admirals and one hundred heads of state and government leaders, all of whom signed a public document confirming abolition as the correct course of action. But, despite his high standing, Butler’s 1998 denunciation of deterrence—while leading to energetic phone calls (for and against), interviews, and conference invitations (including one from Mikhail Gorbachev)—did not result in any formally codified statement of support, nor does it seem to have led to any publicly available counterstatement, an argument rejecting Butler’s claims and defending the coherence of the doctrine that sustains nuclear arsenals, its ethical stature, and its capacity to protect.

After looking at Butler’s analysis, this essay will turn to the writings of Thomas Schelling—the 2005 Nobel prize–winning economist who offered the most comprehensive case for deterrence. The Department of Defense identifies Schelling as “one of the intellectual founders of U.S. nuclear deterrence thinking”; his writings are still used by practitioners today. Can Schelling rebut Butler’s charges? Can nuclear deterrence be defended?

General Butler identifies eight flaws in the mindset and practice of nuclear deterrence:

1. Deterrence “flies in the face of the most vital goal of national security: to ensure the survival of the nation.” Deterrence not only fails to fulfill this primary obligation; it radically contradicts it because it allows the fate of the country—and indeed the world—to turn on a vision of human action and judgment as infallible. This failure leads to Butler’s conclusion that “as a nation we have no greater responsibility than to rethink our reliance on nuclear deterrence, however unpalatable that may be intellectually or politically.”

2. Deterrence is “fatally flawed at the most fundamental level of human psychology.” It is premised on each side in a nuclear conflict presuming to place themselves in the opponent’s position; each believes they are able to understand the other side’s thinking, when in fact there’s no understanding, and often even very little attempt to understand one another. Leaders often aren’t rational, and even in cases where the leaders are “rational,” deterrence doesn’t prevent catastrophe. Robert McNamara, in his interview with filmmaker Errol Morris in Morris’s documentary Fog of War, says of the Cuban Missile Crisis: “Kennedy was rational. Khrushchev was rational.” And yet they came within a “hair’s breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions”; it was only “luck” that saved us, McNamara insists. Butler’s critique also draws on the Cuban Missile crisis: he stresses the “fog of mutual misperception” while “[clinging] to the notion that such a war could be reliably deterred.” With the United States and Soviet Union, it was “a dialogue of the blind with the deaf,” a conflict between two “darkly suspicious adversaries.”

3. The third flaw in deterrence theory is that “the consequences of its failure are intolerable.” With conventional weapons, if you fail to deter, the consequences are bad: you may have just lost the battle; you may even have lost the war; your nation may even be now redesigned to become another nation. But you haven’t lost your whole population and certainly the earth survives. In nuclear deterrence failure, all is destroyed: failing means “poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants for generation upon generation”; jeopardizing “not just the fate of nations but the very meaning of civilization.”

4. The fourth flaw is a fatal contradiction at the very center of deterrence thinking. Deterrence relies on the specter of a huge “second strike” capacity. If my opponent contemplates striking me first, he will be discouraged when he sees that even after that strike, I have an arsenal that can deliver massive retaliation, or at least retaliation far beyond what I just suffered.

But here is the contradiction. To my opponent, this mighty second strike arsenal that I’ve amassed looks an awful lot like a first strike arsenal; and fearing that I might deliver a massive first strike blow, my opponents now have to vastly increase their own second strike line of discouragement, which in turn looks to me like a first strike option. Thus massive second strike—the key to deterrence defined as the practice of preventing nuclear war by discouraging a first strike—somersaults into the perceived position of a first strike. “The bar of deterrence,” Butler writes, “ratchets higher, igniting yet another cycle of trepidation, worst-case assumptions and ever-mounting levels of destructive capability.”

In a 2024 interview, MIT’s Ted Postol argues that the long-range missiles now being scheduled to be stationed in Germany by 2026 for defensive purposes will almost certainly be perceived by Russians as a first strike preparation. Butler gives the earlier example of nuclear-armed MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) that, intended as second strike deterrence, instead “exacerbated serious fears of a nuclear first strike.” Echoing Butler’s description, interviews with twenty-two top Soviet military leaders after the breakup of the Soviet Union suggest that while the announced U.S. policy during the Cold War was second strike deterrence, the Soviet Union believed the United States was preparing for a first strike. Their list of first strike “indicators” leads with MIRVs:

[Soviet military leaders’] most frequently cited indicators included: the development of the highly accurate, multiple warhead MX missile system; programs to develop accurate multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV) warheads for existing missile systems (putting Soviet land-based ICBMs and control systems at risk); the relative vulnerability of U.S. missile silos and control centers to ground bursts; the large and diverse arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe; the consistent rejection by the United States of no first use doctrine; the deployment of the Pershing II missile and ground and sea launched cruise missiles capable of striking command and control targets in Soviet territory with little warning; and the issuance of Presidential Decision Memorandum 59 (PD-59), which the Soviets viewed to be a deliberate policy for launching a surprise decapitating first strike against the Soviet leadership.

Not surprising is the conclusion the adversary drew from this list of indicators: “Soviet modeling and testing was based on the assumption that the United States would strike first.”

5. The fifth flaw follows directly from that central contradiction. Deterrence, Butler writes, fails utterly “as a guide in setting rational limits on size and composition of U.S. and Soviet forces. To the contrary: the appetite of deterrence is “voracious.” It creates an “insatiable arms race.”

The endless weapons research and production result from competition, not just among the weapons makers but between the Air Force and the Navy, who both compete for a preeminent position in the nuclear array. As a result, “new technology is inspired, together with new nuclear weapons designs, and soon new delivery systems roll from production lines.” What proliferates isn’t just weapons but also the “nether worlds” of bureaucracies: “astronomically expensive infrastructures, monolithic bureaucracies, complex processes that defied control or comprehension.”

But the drive for new weapons comes not just from greed or the excitement of creating ever more ingenious forms of massacre; it also comes from that second strike/first strike paradox that resides at the heart of the deterrence philosophy. Deterrence expands rather than contracts the dangers; it heats up rather than cools off; it proliferates weapons and network complexity rather than dampening them down. “As their numbers [swell],” writes Butler, “so [mount] the stakes of miscalculation, of a crisis spun out of control.”

6. The sixth flaw is the profound moral aberration of deterrence. Butler writes: “What better illustration of misplaced faith in nuclear deterrence than the persistent belief that retaliation with nuclear weapons is a legitimate and appropriate response to post–Cold War threats posed by weapons of mass destruction? What could possibly justify our resort to the very means we properly abhor and condemn? . . . What target could warrant such retaliation? Would we hold an entire society accountable for the decision of a single demented leader?”

7. Closely related is the seventh flaw: even before any missiles are launched or populations are slain, deterrence destroys the minds and souls of those who have to bandy about the word “deterrence.”

Butler worries that the cavalier reference to killing millions of people must harm anyone speaking that way. And part of what he considers is the tonal distance between the petty and trivializing idiom of a game theory framework and the immensity and complexity of the reality. So he writes at one point, “invoking deterrence [becomes] a cheap rhetorical parlor trick, a verbal sleight of hand. Proponents persist in dressing it up to court changing times and temperaments” so it will always “fit shrinking or distorted threats.” He adds, “Its wiles cannot be contained.” Butler never names game theory (nor does he ever risk compromising security by quoting the actual sentences swirling around him in the Pentagon or White House or Offutt Air Force Base). He instead, as here, uses the language of parlor tricks, gambling, “aura of utility,” the “easy semantic cover” of deterrence, its quality as “catechism,” “litany,” “folly,” a hybrid of “simple precept” and “treacherous application.” Game theory is widely acknowledged to underwrite much of deterrence theory, and individuals like Thomas Schelling openly describe long bouts of strategic gaming with leading civilian and military leaders. Schelling also describes his own government service in the early 1950s, and his early recognition that bargaining was key to the nuclear architecture.

For Butler, the vocabulary and mental practices of nuclear deterrence damage individuals because they “pander to our darkest instincts. They corrode our sense of humanity, numb our capacity for moral outrage, and make thinkable the unimaginable.” They damage individuals whether they live in capitalist or communist states. Just as deterrence theory damages individuals, so it damages groups of planners. It replaces discussion, deliberation, and debate with a set of moves. Rather than listening to the other side, we’re caught in what one theorist—David Runciman in his 2018 How Democracies End—calls “a technical game of tit-for-tat advantage.”

Butler writes, “From the very beginning of the nuclear era, the objective scrutiny and searching debate essential to adequate comprehension and responsible oversight of its vast enterprises were foreshortened or foregone. The cold light of dispassionate scrutiny was shuttered in the name of security, doubts dismissed in the name of an acute and unrelenting threat, objections overruled by incantations of the nuclear priesthood.”

8. Lastly, nuclear deterrence theory promotes international proliferation. If we think deterrence makes the world safer, then many other countries should adopt it too. Thus it not only incites proliferation by prompting the nuclear country to keep making new weapons; it also proliferates nuclear arsenals by spreading the weapons and ways of thinking to other, formerly non-nuclear, countries. As Butler warns, “Others are listening, [and] have converted to our theology.”

The U.S. defense priesthood celebrates deterrence as keeping the world safe in the second half of the twentieth century and leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Butler once believed this account, but says those decades are far too complex to allow us to believe we already comprehend what happened, and that understanding will only come about after many decades. In the meantime, much evidence contradicts the notion that nuclear deterrence brought down the Berlin Wall: Butler cites Soviet archives crediting NATO’s conventional forces and soft power.

Describing a deeply flawed strategy through these eight flaws, Butler launches his devastating critique of deterrence from the inside as a framework with an “awful willingness not simply to tempt the apocalypse but to prepare its way.” The beliefs and mindsets it generates, he argues, “must be let go.”

While other Department of Defense insiders have not—to this writer’s knowledge—issued a similar denunciation of deterrence, some have issued an equally clear call for nuclear abolition, as can be heard in the words of late Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (whose call for a nuclear-free world assisted the emergence of Nuclear Zero), former Secretary of Defense William Perry (founder of the William Perry Project, the aim of which is to awaken the American public to the dire twenty-first-century peril), and late Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (who in the pages of Foreign Policy and elsewhere described U.S. nuclear weapons policy as “illegal, immoral, and dreadfully dangerous”). Although Kissinger, Perry, and McNamara do not explicitly denounce deterrence as a lie, their call for nuclear abolition reveals their conviction that nuclear deterrence is a false doctrine: a person who believes the Orwellian platitude that “nuclear deterrence prevents nuclear war” would never call for the elimination of nuclear weapons. McNamara and Perry may instead be accurately described as “agonizing” about the urgent importance of eliminating nuclear weapons: McNamara’s eloquent soliloquies in Fog of War, for example, sound—in the strain those soliloquies place on his chest and neck—closer to bodily retching or praying than to speaking. He is a man almost on his knees supplicating the public to hear what he is saying.

While we wait for a government insider or defense contractor to step up to the plate to answer General Butler’s eight charges, we can turn to Schelling, father of deterrence theory, whose influential writings and public talks are routinely (and not inaccurately) described as brilliant. Perhaps he provides the best case that can be given for deterrence. Game theory, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out in its essay on the subject, was originally only a theoretical construct until it got its first real-world material to play with—nuclear war. Schelling’s trio of books on the subject—The Strategy of Conflict (1960), Strategy and Arms Control (1961), and Arms and Influence (1966)—were some of the primary conduits through whom the gift to game theorists was delivered.

Schelling’s case for deterrence bypasses some of Butler’s grounds of denunciation and anticipates others, but does not appear to successfully overcome any of them. He is wholly silent on the moral turpitude of nuclear deterrence in arranging for the mass slaying of populations either by a first strike or a second strike. Schelling raises no query about the moral status of deterrence, or about what he at one point in Arms and Influence quotes a fellow scholar describing as “the usual mercies.” He certainly uses adjectives which ordinarily have a moral valence, as when he describes nuclear bargaining as a particularly “vicious” form of negotiation, or its violence as “monstrous.” But adjectives like “vicious” and “monstrous” are not invoked to express disapproval and certainly not to advocate stepping away from the practice of deterrence being described. And in noting the parallel between international nuclear threats and blackmail or extortion by gangs, he is not launching into a recommendation that we step away from such practices. There are hundreds of such moments in Arms and Influence, reissued in 2008 (this time with a new preface from Schelling providing assurance that its principles are still relevant to the present and to all the new players—new nuclear states) and again in 2020.

Because Schelling bypasses Butler’s sixth flaw, it is not surprising that he also bypasses the seventh, namely, Butler’s perception that the practitioners of deterrence, even if they have not yet overseen the launch of a weapon that massacres a people, have harmed their own minds and hearts by tossing about language that makes them incapable of hearing their own inhumanity. Schelling uses the deterrence language with speed and lucidity and does not pause to voice any worry about the surviving integrity of his own mind and soul. He notes, for example, one practice that might increase the chance that the United States and Russia will abstain from launching weapons against one another: to have all American children spend their kindergarten year in Russia and all Russian children spend their kindergarten year in the United States. (He is careful to stipulate that a given year’s kindergarteners will not be permitted to leave the opponent’s country until the next year’s kindergartners have arrived on that soil.) Schelling’s hideously ingenious suggestion might well be cited by advocates of nuclear abolition, since it shows how maniacal the peril is by showing how maniacal the solution is. But Schelling does not provide the example as prelude to any recommendation for negotiating the weapons out of existence. Similarly, noting that scientists have at times feared that nuclear fission might ignite the atmosphere, he observes that, were that the case, countries could figure out exactly how many nuclear weapons (N) would need to be detonated to ignite the atmosphere and then themselves proceed to detonate N-1 weapons. Rather than working to negotiate nuclear weapons out of existence—the best way to prevent nuclear weapons from exploding the atmosphere or kindergarten children from getting slain—Schelling rests content with keeping the nuclear weapons on hand and carrying out baroque and macabre cruelties to forestall the ultimate civilization-destroying disaster. Though he only rarely introduces disarmament in any of his books, his tone is dismissive when he does. In Strategy of Conflict, he notes that disarmament proposals tend to be either “ingenious” (i.e. unrealistic) or “sentimental” (i.e. worthy of scorn).

In her preface to the 2020 edition of Arms and Influence, Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests that Schelling’s agility in moving between nuclear deterrence examples of negotiation and examples of negotiating traffic jams and child-raising indicates his “humanity,” revealing that he thinks of himself as residing in the midst of targeted civilians (people driving or parenting) rather than among those launching the weapons. But the tonal discrepancy between nuclear war and playful scenarios in which one is outwitted by one’s own children or by fellow drivers might arguably be construed as indicative of the psychic numbing Butler worries about. In the book, Schelling discusses the role of fallout shelters (hypothetical, as he notes, since the United States—unlike Russia, Switzerland, and Norway—has almost none), arguing that the government may jeopardize its warfighting position if it reveals its anticipation of war by warning the population to go into them. Likewise, he worries that if the population were warned in advance and then resided in shelters for several weeks while the nuclear conflict hadn’t yet begun, awareness of the population’s limited endurance might “coerce” the government into initiating a war it might not otherwise undertake.

The loss of reality that a practitioner of deterrence theory is likely to suffer is illustrated when Schelling says in an interview that one could, before actually “using” nuclear weapons, “demonstrate” one’s willingness to use them by launching one, five, or ten nuclear weapons: “a shot across the bow.” Most people would not perceive five nuclear weapons—let’s say, traveling toward Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington, or Miami (or any quintet of cities in any country on earth)—as merely a “demonstration” or indication of a future willingness to use nuclear weapons. Such a startling idea might seem just an anomaly arising out of an interview. But in fact, it is very much part of strategic preparations that differentiates the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan, in which thousands of weapons are exchanged in six hours) from LNO (Limited Nuclear Options, where a small number of missiles are launched), according to William Odom, who served as military assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Carter presidency. He describes his and Brzezinski’s desire to speak with Carter’s Chiefs of Staff about what seemed to them the incomprehensible logic of their LNO plan, but they instead received a memorandum assuring them it would increase credibility with the adversary. Odom writes:

I was puzzled. Why would a half-dozen nuclear weapons launched at any target in the Soviet Union be less likely to provoke a large retaliatory nuclear response if coupled with a Soviet invasion of Western Europe? I tried to imagine President Carter sending Brezhnev a message over the Washington-Moscow Hotline, telling him than an LNO would soon be coming, and not to panic because it consisted of only six weapons and was intended to underscore U.S. credibility and lead to deescalation. And suppose Brezhnev responded, “I understand. I recognize your ‘credibility’ problem, but now I have a credibility problem. So I am launching only four nuclear weapons at Seattle. Do not panic. Additional strikes will not follow before we begin to negotiate.” What could the president do at this point?

Schelling himself identifies as an important flaw in nuclear deterrence a lack of sufficient thinking about how or when two sides can “pause” in the midst of missile exchanges and about how to reach an end. In war, writes Paul Kecskemeti in Strategic Surrender, both sides cling ardently to their beliefs. In order for the war to end, one of them must give up their beliefs; this only happens because gradually losses accumulate, and one side undergoes a perceptual reversal, a “political reorientation” where the idea or possession they thought they couldn’t part with now seems something they can part with. The speed of nuclear war (happening in hours or days), coupled with the structural absence of pauses, makes such a process of reorientation impossible. Schelling himself does not appear to provide any solution to the absence of any rest stops throughout the nuclear exchange. But he very much pictures himself directly speaking to military strategists. His 2008 preface to Arms and Influence, for example, directly acknowledges that military and government officials will make use of his book, and he expresses the hope that new nuclear states will do likewise. He worries that there has been little attempt to build a “pause” option; but again, he is not worried about deterrence, only noting what remains to be done.

Schelling’s bypassing of Butler’s sixth and seventh objections prepares us to recognize how he also evades the first. Butler expresses concern about the military’s first “obligation”—to ensure the survival of the nation. Far from presenting the safety of the population as the highest goal, Schelling observes that a country’s deterrence efforts may well be strengthened if the country makes clear to the opponent its willingness to lose some of its own cities. This argument would seem to be a very direct illustration of Butler’s charge that deterrence fails to ensure national survival, since it provides the country’s national security apparatus with intellectual license to offer one or more of its cities to nuclear annihilation as a way of making good on its own threats. The strategic advantages of the “hostage” phenomenon—whether dwellers in a specified city or all children of kindergarten age or the seven thousand American soldiers in West Berlin whose only purpose, says Schelling, is to die in order to guarantee U.S. retaliation in the event of Soviet trespass into the city—is key throughout Arms and Influence. Partial elimination of the opponent’s population is preferable to total elimination not because fewer people are killed, but because only the existence of survivors provides negotiating power.

Schelling certainly sees the nuclear era as exceptional in the history of warfare, but he does not think the potentially large number of casualties is especially impressive, and he prefaces statements about the whole species being lost by the dismissive phrase “it is said”:

Man has, it is said, for the first time in history enough military power to eliminate his species from the earth. . . . War has become, it is said, so destructive and terrible that it ceases to be an instrument of national power. . . . For dramatic impact these statements are splendid. . . . they do not help to identify just what is new about war.

In World War II, he argues, U.S. soldiers could have killed every individual in Japan with an ice pick. This conclusion seems starkly wrong: Schelling forgets that to do so would require convincing thousands of individual U.S. soldiers to participate (without resistance or dissent) in this inconceivable act (accomplishing the same outcome with nuclear weapons requires only a single individual, the president, to assent); equally inconceivable is the idea that those U.S. soldiers who enter into one-on-one combat with Japanese citizens would in each case be the survivor. But even if his heartlessly inventive examples were plausible, they do not match the loss of the whole species, widely recognized to be a possible outcome of nuclear war and something that differentiates it from conventional warfare in the past or future. “Species” rarely occurs in his text (except to designate a subgenre of intellectual strategy unconnected to human beings); nor does the word “earth.”

Nothing in Schelling suggests that he is at peace with our whole nation (let alone our whole planetary civilization) being lost, but neither does he very often seem to perceive the truth of the “splendid” sentences pointing to the loss of the whole species as a possibility, nor does he put forward an argument that we are not in danger of losing our whole population. In Butler’s formulation the military, or national security, has as its primary responsibility ensuring our country’s survival, yet Schelling might well point out that it is wholly predictable that his own view should be at odds with the military’s (and hence with Butler’s) since he repeatedly stresses throughout Arms and Influence that strategy in the nuclear age is at odds with classical military strategy on exactly this point. He repeatedly differentiates military objectives (victory; disabling the other side’s military force) from nuclear negotiation (“hurt” and “suffering”), outcomes he believes the military has almost never sought, except in rare exceptions such as Sherman’s march through Georgia or Sheridan’s against the Comanches: their wanton acts of cruelty, he writes, are rare instances where military practice of the past provided precedents for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Thus he writes: “Proud military establishments do not like to think of themselves as extortionists.” Many other moments in Arms and Influence register a fork in the road between conventional military interests (which, he reiterates, ordinarily have no interest in causing suffering) and nuclear strategy (centered in hurt and suffering).

In own writings and often quoted by others, Schelling makes the idea of “hurt” central to his definition of nuclear power. As he is quoted in a 2016 article from West Point’s Modern War Institute: “The power to hurt is bargaining power. . . . To exploit it is diplomacy, vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” Admirers of these statements often see it as an extension of Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” But Schelling’s statement is much more radical, anarchic, and amoral than is Clausewitz’s recognition that conflicts and the settling of conflicts are shared by politics and war. In the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes, negotiation, agreement, and conversation are the radical opposite of war, not phenomena that can be coupled with war. The whole point of the social contract, as he repeats over and over in Leviathan, “is getting us out of the miserable condition of war.” In three different works—Leviathan, On the Citizen, and De Corpore—Hobbes states that injury is to the social contract what logical absurdity is to discourse. Schelling understands this: he rightly points out that in classical military strategy, negotiation is the very opposite of acts carried out to inflict suffering. The hybrid of negotiation and suffering, he often repeats, comes only with nuclear deterrence.

Butler’s second objection—that deterrence requires a form of psychology incompatible with preventing war—specifies that one key psychological feature of deterrence is its overreliance on “western reason.” Others have made this particular critique. Schelling himself complains that game theory is often accused (wrongly, in his view) of being “hyper-rational” when in reality, he counters, it can be used as a way of dealing with “children and animals,” and is therefore an appropriate tool for “irrational” as well as “rational” situations. Schelling of course recognizes historical examples of leaders who are out of control (Khrushchev), who say things that he considers wildly imprudent and dangerous (Kennedy’s October 22, 1962 public threat to the Soviet Union, a potentially fatal lapse from an otherwise rational participant), or who are stark madmen (Hitler). He credits “irrationality” as itself a potential strategy, as in the “madman” theory where a person who appears deranged gets his way because the opponent sees his adversary may not have the option of pulling back. In his famous example of two cars speeding toward each other in a game of chicken, the driver who holds a detached steering wheel up in the air wins. Late in Arms and Influence, he lists other sources of irrationality that afflict both the United States and the Soviets: “budgetary inertia, interservice disputes, ideological touchstones, and the intellectual limitations of a political bureaucracy, as well as from plain bad information.”

But as Butler and many other observers complain, deterrence assumes that two countries locked in exchanging threats will maintain a rational frame. In many interviews, Schelling maintains that rationality will not break down. For instance, in an appearance on a 1986 public television program, he is asked if he can imagine any situation that might cause deterrence to break down. He says he cannot. The interviewer then presents him with a series of plausible breakdown scenarios, to which Schelling responds in turn: high-level government officials are “unwilling to do things that they genuinely think would be reckless”; escalation would be “an abdication of responsibility”; “foolish things” or actions “mistakenly perceived” by both sides would have to happen before nuclear war became inevitable. But high-tension moments of international conflict are precisely situations liable to contain recklessness, foolishness, misperception, and abdication of responsibility. Schelling insists that rationality will remain in place.

It should be noted that Schelling’s hypothetical response to Butler’s second objection also explains why he cannot answer Butler’s third, namely, “the consequences of failure are intolerable.” Many would say this observation alone provides a reason for immediate disarmament. But Schelling can’t address this possibility (other than as a set of “splendid sentences”) because he really cannot comprehend how deterrence could break down: it hasn’t broken down, he reports, in all the war games he’s been playing with high-level civilian and military officers; and after all, that would be foolish. At one point in the 1986 interview, he claims, citing his war gaming experience, that “escalation to nuclear war is extremely unlikely.” Then, after elaborating the nature of the gaming (and the high-level military and government people involved), he reiterates the claim while making it slightly less absolute: “Therefore I tend not to believe that every war escalates nuclear and becomes a holocaust.” When asked again if he believes a nuclear exchange will “inevitably escalate into the destruction of both sides,” he repeats that escalation is “doubtful.” Now the interviewer presses him on imagining a situation in Berlin that would lead to “nuclear escalation.” He says he can’t see how that could happen: it would have to be “fog of war,” or confusion, or one side incorrectly perceiving the other.

A genre of event others may think moves us closer to disaster, an increase in the possibility of accidental nuclear war, Schelling instead judges to be an event that moves as farther away from disaster. In The Strategy of Conflict, after acknowledging that the risk of accidental nuclear war increases during periods of international crises, Schelling asks, “But is not this mechanism itself a kind of deterrent threat?” It is, he explains, because the recognition that the moment is dangerous means everyone is more careful.

Butler’s second objection—a mismatch between the psychology of deterrence and handling of nuclear weapons—is based not only on an inappropriate reliance on a rational frame but a pretense of understanding what the opponent is thinking (while not actually making an effort to understand the opponent). The importance of listening to one’s enemy has throughout history been recognized, formalized in the Latin principle audi alteram partem—hear the other side. This at the very least means that during the deliberations about whether to issue a declaration of war, someone on the home side voices the point of view of the foreign adversary in order to test the legitimacy of the claims made against the putative “enemy” (in fact, the accuracy of the term “enemy” is what is often debated), as I’ve detailed in my 2014 book, Thermonuclear Monarchy. This description is true of the Congressional debates preceding the vote on the United States’ declaration of war prior to the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War of 1846, the 1898 Spanish-American War, and World War I. In the case of World War II, the deliberations on the declarations of war against Japan, Germany, and Italy were completed in a few hours after the United States had been attacked, yet prior to Pearl Harbor there had been two years of discussion about whether the United States should enter the war, during which the adversary’s perspective was sometimes voiced.

While ordinarily members of the home country (in the interest of heading off a needless or erroneous war) take it upon themselves to understand and articulate the opponent’s point of view, in unusual cases, a representative of the opposing nation may get to make the argument, and not just in quoted reports, but inside the deliberating assembly. In Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the Lacedaemonians, meeting in assembly to debate going to war against Athens, permitted an Athenian (a merchant, there on business) to address the assembly. In the age of nuclear deterrence, little room appears to be made for listening to a rival country’s suffering, its border fears, its aspirations, its sources of pride, its fear of shaming, its sense of necessity. “Hear the other side” has been reduced to hearing only the threats made by the other side, hearing information on the number and placement of their weapons, overhearing (through surveillance) their war games. It is empty of almost all psychological content other than winning and losing, even in a frame where everyone loses. Schelling repeatedly stresses the importance of “communication.” But it is communication restricted to moves and countermoves.

We have so far covered five features of General Butler’s denunciation of nuclear deterrence—objections one, two, three, six, and seven. We will now turn to the inadequate response Schelling provides to Butler’s fifth and eighth objections. We will then turn to an important place where their visions meet: Butler’s fourth objection. In pursuing it, we will come upon what Schelling himself identifies a desirable form of disarmament (the only form of disarmament he appears to countenance).

Butler’s fifth objection is that weapons production is out of control. The surfeit of nuclear arms is often something upon which both advocates of disarmament and advocates of deterrence agree. Today there are twelve thousand warheads worldwide (the number includes approximately 2,500 that are nominally “retired” but not dismantled and therefore readily available for use). Research by Rutgers University scientists shows that if even less than one percent of this arsenal is used, twenty million people will die on the first afternoon and a billion in the thirty days following an exchange of nuclear weapons. The total number of the world arsenal is, by all accounts, enough to destroy the surface of the earth many times over.

When Schelling first published Arms and Influence in 1966, the world stockpile was thrice as high as that of today; when Strategy and Conflict was reissued in 1980, it was approaching its peak of fifty-four thousand warheads. Nearly alone among either disarmament or deterrence advocates, Schelling was not concerned about these numbers. In Arms and Influence, he observes that deterrence theorists who feel confident that countries will not intentionally go to war often worry that a nuclear war may start by accident, and they believe that the chances of accident go up as the number of warheads goes up. Schelling argues the contrary. We need these high numbers of weapons, he writes, in order to

have forces secure enough and so adequate in number that they need not react with haste for fear of not being able to react at all, secure enough and so adequate in number that, when excited by alarm, we can be conservative and doubt the enemy’s intent to attack, and that the enemy has confidence in our ability to be calm, helping him keep calm himself.

Schelling gives a second reason. He argues that locks on weapons and restraining devices on procedures will be resisted and foregone if we have lower numbers of warheads, and have to fear that some of our weapons may turn out to be duds. We will be more reluctant to put brakes on any of them. He acknowledges that the argument on this point is not yet settled, but urges that his view—that high warhead numbers decrease the chance of accidental nuclear war—ought at least to be taken into account.

In his earlier book, Strategy and Arms Control, co-written with Morton Halperin, Schelling had already voiced the notion that large numbers of weapons could decrease rather than increase the odds of accidental nuclear war: “It would be pushing the argument to an extreme to suggest that the present arms race is safer than an arms-control environment would be.” In fact he goes on to argue that it may be virtuous—or at least wise—to renege on an arms agreement:

It is unwise to expect any government to adhere long to the spirit and letter of an agreement that it has come to perceive as no longer compatible with its security interests. It has to be acknowledged that the motives for open violation, even clandestine violation, may be of the most respectable or of the most reprehensible sort. And the very likelihood that the other main participants, or the opposing bloc of participants, may at any time abandon the agreement is itself a motive for continually analyzing the wisdom of going along. There may, on the analogy with war itself, be a phenomenon of “preventive” or “pre-emptive” violation or denunciation.

In The Strategy of Conflict, he argues similarly that larger number of missiles on both sides decrease the danger of a first strike by the adversary.

Butler not only worries about the proliferation of weapons inside any one country, but about the spread of weapons across countries—his eighth objection: if the key to peace and the avoidance of nuclear war is having nuclear weapons, then other countries will not only want, but should want, to acquire them. Here again Schelling is blind to the logic that framing nuclear deterrence as an agent of peace prompts other nations to acquire the weapons. In his 2008 preface to Arms and Influence, he expresses his hope that new members of the nuclear club will read and benefit from his account of strategic deterrence: “My expectation is that Indians and Pakistanis who think about these things will find the book quite pertinent; my hope is that North Koreans and Iranians who think about these things will find the book illuminating.” He hopes even terrorists will see they should use nuclear weapons to negotiate, and not detonate the weapons themselves. But neither in this book nor other books does he welcome the spread of weapons, and he recommends, among other things, the possibility that Russia and the United States work together to discourage newcomers from acquiring nuclear weapons. Crucially, he does not recognize that the buoyant account he gives of nuclear strategy (which provides a new country with a glowing account of the advantages of possession) is contradicted by his worry about other countries having them: “It seems very likely that the world would be more dangerous if a dozen or so countries developed nuclear capabilities.”

We now turn at last to Butler’s fourth objection, the only one with which Schelling appears to be in agreement, or at least partial agreement. Nuclear deterrence seeks to amass a second strike arsenal that will discourage (deter) the enemy from carrying out a first strike; but that defensive arsenal may be construed by the enemy as preparation for a first strike, thereby accelerating that opponent’s own advance toward a first strike. Deterrence, if this is true, continually threatens to bring about the very act it was designed to suppress.

This is one phenomenon Schelling agrees with throughout his writings. For example, in Strategy and Arms Control he writes:

It is sometimes argued that airborne alert for the bomber force is a ‘stabilizing’ measure; it provides assurance that we could retaliate after an attack. . . . At the same time, it has been argued that airborne alert is ‘provocative’ in getting a fraction of our bomber force in a state of alert that could be exploited for a quick effort to knock out Soviet bombers and missiles.”

In Arms and Influence, Schelling generalizes this feedback loop (no longer confining it to the airborne bomber force): from as early as 1958 forward, Americans, Soviets, and the wider arms control community have recognized “the possibility that, in a crisis, reciprocal suspicions might be amplified by a feedback process, each side’s preparation against surprise looking like preparations for attack.” In The Strategy of Conflict, Schelling dedicates an entire chapter to the feedback loop: “If surprise carries an advantage, it is worthwhile to avert it by striking first. Fear that the other may be about to strike in the mistaken belief that we are about to strike gives us a motive for striking, and so justifies the other’s motive.” Entitled “The Reciprocal Fear of Surprise Attack,” the chapter examines the conditions under which the nuclear feedback loop, already dangerous, remains steady or instead becomes continually self-amplifying. Schelling’s attention to the feedback loop warrants yet another chapter in Strategy and Conflict: “We live in an era in which a potent incentive on either side—perhaps the main incentive—to initiate total war with a surprise attack is the fear of being a poor second for not going first.”

Quite apart from this feedback loop, in which the key move in nuclear deterrence incites the onset of nuclear war it was supposed to prevent, Schelling over and over acknowledges that participants will perceive “first strike” as the winning move, as here in Arms and Influence:

Military technology that puts a premium on haste in a crisis puts a premium on war itself. A vulnerable military force is one that cannot wait, especially if it faces an enemy force that is vulnerable if the enemy waits.

If the weapons can act instantaneously by the flip of a switch, a “go” signal, and can arrive virtually without warning to do decisive damage, the outcome of the crisis depends simply on who first finds the suspense unbearable. If the leaders on either side think the leaders on the other are about to find it unbearable, their motive to throw the switch is intensified.

In The Strategy of Conflict, Schelling quotes others as saying first strike is an advantage and abstaining from first strike a disadvantage. He cites General Leslie R. Groves, for instance, who argued that “our reluctance to strike first is a military disadvantage to us; but it is also, paradoxically, a factor in preventing a world conflict today.” And Schelling in his own voice repeatedly acknowledges the strategic advantage of first strike:

We do not . . . assess American and Soviet strategic forces by counting up the bombers, missiles, submarines, and aircraft carriers on both sides, as though we wanted to see who could put on the most impressive peace-time parade. ‘Who is ahead?’ in the arms race will usually be: whoever strikes first.

He credits the idea that if first strike capability were eliminated on all sides, this would amount to a form of disarmament.

Schelling’s openness to even the word “disarmament” here is potentially fertile ground for anyone trying to understand how the denunciation of deterrence and the celebration of deterrence have any hope for locating common ground. Schelling, after all, is usually dismissive of disarmament. He speaks in Arms and Influence of disarmament talks as distracting and unhelpful, in his comments like “the noise emanating from Geneva” or his reference to “Pugwash Conference and other minor efforts.”

One chapter contemplates disarming all countries and relying on an international force armed with nuclear weapons to maintain the peace: but at its best, he argues, such a force would only carry out what the United States and NATO can already carry out, and at its worst it might become something so authoritarian it would require on the citizenry’s part a revolution.

The fact that Schelling acknowledges the dismantling of first strike as a form of disarmament is crucial. Peace activists—as well as former members of the Department of Defense, like William Perry—often argue the same: if every country adopts a No First Use policy, there ceases to be any way for a nuclear war to occur. China and India have long had No First Use policies, as has Russia during some periods. The United States has never embraced No First Use, despite the fact that at least two of its presidents—Obama and Biden—have at various times considered eliminating the country’s First Use policy, and despite repeated invitations from Russia and a current invitation from China in its July 2024 “No-first-use of Nuclear Weapons Initiative Working Paper” submitted to the United Nations, reaffirming its own pledge of No First Use and urging “the five nuclear-weapon States to negotiate and conclude a treaty on ‘mutual no-first-use of nuclear weapons’” or issue a political statement in this regard.

Schelling’s specific proposal for disarmament based on elimination of first strike unfortunately seems to quickly become a magnified form of deterrence theory, rather than a major step toward the total disarmament the nuclear states promised in the Nonproliferation Treaty. Schelling believes that surprise attack can be ended by eliminating first strike weapons, or by eliminating first strike practices, or by eliminating first strike advantages. He proposes seeking to remove all weapons designed to take out the adversary’s military (in his view, these are first strike weapons), and keep only those weapons designed to massacre the populations of cities (in his view, second strike weapons); though he acknowledges that there is no bright line separating the two genres. He urges that both sides will need very high, not very low, numbers of these anti-population weapons; and drawing on the writing of deterrence colleague Bernard Brodie, he supposes that they should be high potency, “super-dirty bombs . . . as horrendous as possible.” Submarines play a large role in this vision.

Butler described deterrence as full of “logical contradictions,” and here is one more. After our long journey that began with the acknowledgment that deterrence sets up second strike to eliminate first strike, but finds that it fails because the second strike looks to the adversary like a first strike and therefore encourages the adversary to himself carry out a first strike, we now have a proposal that we can move to disarmament by, yes, setting up a disarmament protocol based on anti-population second strike weapons and eliminating first strike, forgetting altogether that these second strike weapons will look to the adversary like first strike, carrying us back to our original “orgy” (Schelling’s word) of destruction.

Nuclear deterrence strategists openly concede that they use threats of annihilation as “blackmail” for coercing the adversary’s compliance with our country’s demands. Perhaps the citizenry of our country has passively accepted nuclear deterrence by the same rhythms of blackmail. Just as Schelling argues that mounting nuclear arsenals make us safer (making us reluctant to argue that our arsenals be reduced), and just as he argues that international crises decrease the likelihood of nuclear war by putting us on high alert (making us tolerate our government’s forward path into crisis after crisis), so here at last Schelling tells us the elimination of first strike is only going to eliminate military targets and produce massive preparation for attacks on foreign cities (making us reluctant to demand what the most minimal moral impulse would require of us, the elimination of first strike). We are intimidated into accepting our country’s large arsenals, frequent participation in international crises, and a national policy of first use in the same way that the country’s adversaries are intimidated into acceding to U.S. demands.

However, Schelling’s even momentary equation of the elimination of first use with disarmament coincides with many voices urging its elimination. With seventy nations having ratified or acceded to the International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and with pending U.S. legislation and litigation-in-preparation on the unconstitutionality of presidential first use of nuclear weapons, the world is ready for the elimination of first strike, as well as taking weapons off alert (a practice confined to the United States and its British and French allies) and keeping missiles unmated to delivery systems (as has long been China’s practice) until further steps toward disarmament can be achieved.

Thomas Schelling’s Nobel prize–winning writings make perfectly clear the true and truly hideous character of the negotiations embedded in deterrence. They only confirm the eight flaws identified by General Lee Butler, the former head of our nuclear forces, in his denunciation of the theory and practice of deterrence.

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