Are NATO’s mutual security commitments strong enough today to deter all adversaries? Is the nuclear umbrella as credible as it was during the Cold War? Backed by the full range of US and allied military capabilities, NATO’s mutual defense treaty has been enormously successful, but today’s commitments are strained by military budget cuts and antinuclear sentiment. The United States has also shifted its focus away from European security during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and more recently with the Asia rebalance. Will a resurgent Russia change this?
The Future of Extended Deterrence brings together experts and scholars from the policy and academic worlds to provide a theoretically rich and detailed analysis of post–Cold War nuclear weapons policy, nuclear deterrence, alliance commitments, nonproliferation, and missile defense in NATO but with implications far beyond. The contributors analyze not only American policy and ideas but also the ways NATO members interpret their own continued political and strategic role in the alliance.
In-depth and multifaceted, The Future of Extended Deterrence is an essential resource for policy practitioners and scholars of nuclear deterrence, arms control, missile defense, and the NATO alliance.
This is a study of the strategic challenges that Soviet ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs may pose for the Western alliance. David Yost suggests that the challenges for Western policy stem partly from Soviet military programs, Soviet arms control policies, and Soviet public diplomacy campaigns, and partly from the West’s own intra-alliance disagreements and lack of consensus about Western security requirements.
By reviewing the history of Western assessments of Soviet BMD, Yost shows that long before the American strategic defense initiative (SDI) was launched, Soviet BMD system modernization and infrastructure expansion were well under way, and that current Soviet programs are not mainly reactive to the SDI. Yost judges that the Soviets are probably better prepared than the Americans to deploy a network of traditional, ground-based BMD systems that would have at least some military value in the next decade, particularly against the limited and selective retaliatory attacks envisaged in NATO strategy. He does not argue that the Soviets are preparing for a clear-cut “breakout” from current arms control limits on BMD, but he notes the risks posed by activities that could eventually amount to a “creepout” from certain treaty constraints. Because of such ambiguities and the seriousness of the strategic and political stakes, the West should be prepared to pursue any necessary countermeasures in a timely fashion. His aim in this book is to advance understanding of the possible strategic challenges to the West and to identify potential points of consensus for Western policies.
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