Credit: Harvard University Press / Big Think
Key Takeaways
- Deterrence began as a criminological concept rooted in the idea that fear of punishment prevents crimes.
- The idea migrated into nuclear policy only in the 1950s, largely through the influence of lawyers and legal reasoning.
- Cold War strategists ultimately reframed deterrence around credibility and proportional response as nuclear parity made massive retaliation less believable.
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Adapted from Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended Up Serving the Military-Industry Complex by Benjamin Wilson, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2025 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.The verb deter was coined in the English language in the 16th century from the Latin deterreo (to frighten) and first applied systematically in 18th- and 19th-century criminological texts. During the 1850s, the English criminologist T.B.L. Baker invented the noun form deterrence to capture an idea about the effects of actual and potential punishment on criminal thought and behavior. Early criminologists believed that criminals who possessed what the utilitarian philosopher (and early deterrence theorist) Jeremy Bentham called “rational agency” were susceptible to the fear of punishment. Modern criminologists argued that punishments such as prison sentences should not be seen as they had been in an earlier age: as acts of moral retribution or as efforts to reform the criminal. Punishments should be seen as “deterrents”: rational tools to prevent crime by warning would-be criminals about what to expect for committing similar infractions. As one criminological textbook explained in 1912, the “theory of deterrence” prescribed punishment “not because wrong has been done but in order that wrong may not be done.”
Supporters of criminological deterrence theory endorsed two key ideas that had been introduced in the 18th century by the Milanese Enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria. Beccaria had argued for “proportion between crimes and punishments” — the idea that the punishment should fit the crime. He also argued that the efficacy of deterrence depended more on the speed and certainty of punishment than the severity of punishment. According to one deterrence theorist writing in 1924, “There is no relation between the severity of punishment and the amount of deterrence.” That writer performed an increasingly common rhetorical move among 20th-century criminologists, reifying deterrence into a scientific object and a kind of substance that could exist in greater or lesser quantities.
The theory was not universally accepted among criminologists. Detractors doubted that criminals were guided by utilitarian cost-benefit calculations. A rival theory, developed in the 19th century, viewed criminality as a biological disease or deviant psychological condition. In 1938, one skeptic suggested that the “complicated mental performance” required by the theory was undermined by “pathological stages of fearlessness.” A “born rebel … deters his opponents by being untouched by any kinds of deterrence.” A character in Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, a 1930 novel, put it this way: “Too much of one gland, too little of another, and you get your murderer, your thief, your habitual criminal.”
Thinkers transported the terms deter and deterrent to the field of international relations after the First World War. Aware of these terms’ criminological origins, they built their proposals on a foundational “domestic analogy,” originally explored by Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius, which compared the international realm to a “society of states.” Thus interwar advocates of the League of Nations called for an “international police force” of bomber aircraft. As Lord Davies put it in 1930, the police force would engage in “deterring the would-be aggressor from the crime of war.”
Perhaps it was only natural that later thinkers viewed atomic weapons as “deterrents.” What was the bomb if not the ultimate policing tool for restraining crimes against peace? At the end of the Second World War, several US officials suggested that the United Nations should hold a monopoly on atomic weapons, deploying a nuclear-armed air force to maintain international peace and prevent aggression. Harold Stassen, a member of the US delegation to the United Nations charter conference, introduced the idea publicly in a 1945 speech describing the scheme as a “world stabilization force for world order.” Later he called the idea “atoms for police.”
Yet it is interesting that the term deterrence did not appear in early discussions of atomic policy and strategy. Bernard Brodie, a naval analyst working at Yale University, argued in a pair of essays published in 1946 that the atomic bomb was the ultimate deterrent to war. But Brodie did not use the term deterrence, nor did he develop the concept systematically in these essays. Not until the second half of the 1950s would American strategic thinkers understand “deterrence” to be their primary object of study.
There were at least two reasons for the delay. For one, deterrence remained a specialized term for a criminological concept. It awaited introduction to the nuclear realm by legal experts who moved into the new institutions of the postwar nuclear security state. For another, during the early Cold War period, many US elites doubted that an atomic-armed Soviet Union was deterrable. Before deterrence could become the main subject of security studies, analysts needed to believe that the enemy could be deterred.
Attorneys played a strikingly prominent role in early nuclear policy discussions. Their contributions throw different light on scholars’ claim that US nuclear strategists fashioned a special machine like “Cold War rationality.” For many US elites, the question of nuclear rationality was the question whether Soviet leaders were deterrable. Could the Soviets be trusted to behave reasonably with their new weapons? Could they become upstanding members of society, or were they born criminals? Debates about Cold War rationality reprised an earlier discourse about criminal nature versus nurture and the educability of felons. Cold War rationality was “criminal rationality” in a world where America was policeman, jailer, and judge.
William Liscum Borden was a law student at Yale in 1946 when he wrote There Will Be No Time, a book disputing the idea that the “possession of atomic bombs by both potential belligerents will act as a mutual deterrent.” Borden made his case with reference to the legal treatment of war crimes. Some legal experts believed that the punishments issued at the Nuremberg Trials would serve as a deterrent to future aggression. Borden said that was wrong. “Fear of social revenge … fails to discourage the aggression of ordinary pickpockets and murderers, much less a dictator whose entire country must be defeated before he is brought to the gallows,” he wrote. The same was true of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Facing a criminal autocrat, the United States needed to prepare for war with the Soviets by all possible means, including tactical atomic weapons delivered by bomber and rocket.
After the Soviet Union tested its first atomic weapon in 1949, some US observers considered that perhaps the Soviets were deterrable, but only if the United States maintained massive atomic superiority. The State Department official Paul Nitze advanced that claim in NSC-68, a founding document of Cold War policy submitted in 1950 to the White House National Security Council (NSC). “For the moment our atomic retaliatory capability is probably adequate to deter the Kremlin from a deliberate direct military attack,” Nitze wrote. But once the Soviets possessed “a sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us, nullifying our atomic superiority,” they “might be tempted to strike swiftly and with stealth.”
Scholars have assumed that the concept of strategic stability arose naturally and inevitably from thinking about the objective realities of weapons technology and strategic logic, [but] the concept of stability was a metaphor sourced from fields that had nothing to do with the study of strategy.
The term deterrence finally appeared in the nuclear debate in September 1951. It was brought there by Senator Brien McMahon, an attorney who had led the Criminal Justice Division in the Department of Justice during the 1930s. As a legal official, McMahon had written articles and given lectures on criminal deterrence theory. After the war, he fashioned a new political career around atomic issues, sponsoring a bill to establish the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and chairing the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (where Borden became his assistant). During a congressional debate in September 1951, McMahon called for a greater emphasis on the bomb in US military planning, chiefly for reasons of cost effectiveness. “A short three years ago we groaned at spending ten billions to discourage Soviet aggression,” he remarked. “Today we must spend, not ten billions, but six times ten billions. Sixty billions for deterrence this year, and I fear seventy billions next year.” McMahon claimed that an atomic bomb would become cheaper to manufacture than a tank. He said he wanted “a sweeping variety of atomic weapons,” mass-produced by the thousands.
Deterrence appeared in print again in 1953, this time in Report on the Atom by Gordon Dean. Dean, also a lawyer, had assisted McMahon in the Justice Department during the 1930s. He later served as the second chair of the AEC. A large atomic arsenal was enough to deter the Soviets, Dean believed: “If deterrence of an all-out Soviet attack has been accomplished, let us say with hundreds or a few thousand bombs … just how much greater is the deterrence accomplished by a stockpile of hundreds of thousands of atomic bombs?” Not much, in his view.
By 1954, deterrence was moving to the center of professional nuclear discourse. With Stalin now dead and the Soviet Thaw underway, American commentators increasingly agreed that the Soviets could be deterred. The question was how. The Eisenhower administration’s newly announced policy was that of “massive retaliation,” described by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in a January 1954 speech. Dulles — another lawyer — compared the problem of international security to the deterrence of burglary. Just as “would-be aggressors are generally deterred” by a “community security system” designed to “catch and punish any who break in and steal,” the United States would provide community security in the international realm with its “massive retaliatory power.” Dulles soon qualified his remarks. The United States had not laid plans to turn “every local war into a world war,” he insisted. Nevertheless, it appeared the United States would respond to communist troops and tanks by dropping H-bombs on Moscow and Beijing.
In November that year, the Princeton University political scientist William Kaufmann scrutinized the policy of massive retaliation by asking whether, and what, it could deter. Deterrence, Kaufmann wrote, “constitutes a special kind of forecast: a forecast about the costs and risks that will be run under certain conditions, and the advantages that will be gained if those conditions are avoided.” Kaufmann said the key to deterrence was “credibility.” For a deterrence policy to be credible, the deterrer should possess the ability and clear intention to carry out the threat. The problem with massive retaliation was its lack of credibility. US officials knew the Soviets would soon possess their own thermonuclear arsenal. A study prepared earlier that year by the NSC forecast that by decade’s end, a war would bring vast destruction to both sides. “This situation could create a condition of mutual deterrence in which each side would be strongly inhibited from [deliberately initiating] general war,” according to the study. That was the trouble with massive retaliation. Neither side wanted a thermonuclear war, but the policy threatened to start one in response to conventional aggression. Would the Americans really sacrifice New York City to drop bombs on Moscow because the Soviets had overrun West Berlin, for instance?
Kaufmann argued that a more credible deterrence policy would see the United States match threats across a spectrum of infractions, from local conventional attacks to thermonuclear assault. Alert to the criminological metaphor, Kaufmann said the United States should “fit the punishment to the crime,” replying in kind to all levels of aggression, whether carried out by troops, tanks, or H-bombs. The United States could not rely on thermonuclear superiority alone. It needed to build up its conventional forces, including troop numbers and tactical airpower.
By 1955, deterrence was the keyword of US security studies. Analysts had reached several conclusions — above all that the threat of retaliation could persuade the Soviet Union not to attack the United States or its allies. Several analysts, supported by official estimates, had recognized that America’s overwhelming nuclear superiority would not last forever. The Soviets were building their own thermonuclear arsenal, and once they had it, the credibility of massive retaliation would evaporate. A condition of stalemate at the thermonuclear level would set in. Credible deterrence would require the United States to wield less-than-massive retaliatory options, including more robust conventional capabilities and even tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use.
Soon a new thought emerged from analysts’ deliberations about the proper strategy for the thermonuclear age: The notion that deterrence could be stabilized. Scholars have assumed that the concept of strategic stability arose naturally and inevitably from thinking about the objective realities of weapons technology and strategic logic, [but] the concept of stability was a metaphor sourced from fields that had nothing to do with the study of strategy.
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