Abstract: Emerging technologies possess the potential to transform military competition and the international system in an uncertain, potentially destabilizing fashion. Are there ways to capture the benefits of these new technologies without unleashing catastrophic dangers? What insights and lessons can we glean from history—particularly from the Cold War experience the United States had with nuclear weapons—to help us navigate the challenges of today and tomorrow’s new technologies? This essay examines the concept of strategic stability, and in particular, the important ideas from the foundational thinker of the nuclear age, Thomas Schelling. For decades, strategic stability has been offered as both the prized goal and the great accomplishment of America’s nuclear statecraft, with Schelling acknowledged as the idea’s father. Examined closely, however, questions, tensions, and even contradictions appear, both in Schelling’s work and in the use of strategic stability to describe America’s nuclear strategy and statecraft.
Francis J. Gavin (Tue,) studied this question.