Revisiting the Effectiveness of Nuclear Compellent Threats

Are nuclear threats useful for compellence? We argue that the current debate between nuclear coercionists and pessimists is misleading because it fails to adequately incorporate strategic selection. We divide nuclear compellent threats into two types: those that arise out of a crisis in which states have the opportunity to select out, and those that come as a surprise to targets such that they cannot select out. In the former, because selection yields states that are well-matched in terms of commitment and capability, it is not possible to predicted the outcome ex ante; instead, it will be determined by intra-crisis signaling. In the latter, compellers’ and targets’ nuclear capabilities should influence outcomes because these capabilities were not factored into the initial crisis decision. Examination of all cases of nuclear compellence since 1945, including case studies of the US–Japan (1945) and Sino–Soviet (1969) crises, demonstrates these mechanisms at work.