NUCLEAR WEAPONS UNIQUELY ALLOW FOR DETERRENCE Kenneth N. Waltz. Nuclear Myths and Political Realities The American Political Science Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Sep, 1990), p. In the sands more and more emphasis was placed on the need to fight and defend at all levels in order to "deter" The melding of defense, war-fighting, and deterrence overlooks a simple truth about nuclear weapons proclaimed in the book title The Absolute Weapon (Brodie 1946). Nuclear weapons can carryout their deterrent task no matter what other countries do. If one nuclear power were able to destroy almost all of another's strategic warheads with practical certainty or defend against all but a few strategic warheads coming in, nuclear weapons would not be absolute. But because so much explosive power comes in such small packages, the invulnerability of a sufficient number of warheads is easy to achieve and the delivery of fairly large numbers of warheads impossible to thwart, both now and as far into the future as anyone can see. The absolute quality of nuclear weapons sharply sets a nuclear world off from a conventional one.
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