Brodie, Bernard. "The Development of Nuclear Strategy". International Security, Vol.2, No.4 (1978): 65-83.

Brodie, Bernard. "The Development of Nuclear Strategy". International Security, Vol.2, No.4 (1978): 65-83.

• "Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind. The writer in making that statement is not for the moment concerned about who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used. Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose" (65, original quote from pg.76 of 'The Absolute Weapon' by Bernard Brodie).
• The requirements of a strategy of nuclear deterrence would be the protection of the weapons required for retaliation. Traditional forms of military strategy, like arms buildups, will matter less since, once the threshold of massive nuclear devastation is reached, arsenal sizes do not deter attack. It has also changed the political circumstances of war, since the costs of conflict are now overwhelmingly high (65-66).
• During the period in American history [1940s to 1970s], American policy on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence has been mainly influenced and developed by civilian academics. Academics and their theories had a major influence on the decisions of the US military (67).
• The American development of nuclear submarines and ICBMs, concealed beneath the water and concrete bunkers, respectively, provided an enormous deal of deterrence beyond the limited protections of the nuclear bombers constantly in flight (69).
• The creation of hardened missile silos and the development of more advance ICBM technologies, such as multiple warheads on single missiles, make American nuclear attacks more difficult to develop counter-measures against, guaranteeing their utility as deterrence (70-71).
• "The appropriate question is: who in the Soviet Union thinks they can fight and win a nuclear war? The article tells us that it is some Soviet generals who think so, not a single political leader being mentioned. One could at this point dismiss the issue by remarking that there are also plenty of U.S. generals who think that the United States could fight and win a nuclear war and are even willing to give a definition for the word 'win', though few of us would be comfortable with that definition" (72).
• The author considers the claims of members of the Committee on the Present Danger to be ridiculous and dangerous. They have claimed that Soviet civil defense readiness is robust enough to drastically lower the deaths from nuclear war, and that the high casualty toll during WWII demonstrates a Soviet resolve to suffer massive casualties to destroy its political enemies (73).
• Organizations like the Committee on the Present Danger do not usually provide recommendations about appropriate alternatives to deterrence. They often talk about 'war-winning strategies', but in the context of nuclear war, the meaning of this phrase is unclear. No alternatives to deterrence currently exist (74).
• The type of attacks which deterrence was effective for have been the subject of debate. Some cling to the notion that the threat of nuclear weapons deters any and all attacks, while other note that strategic nuclear weapons only deters the use of nuclear weapons by others, with other forms of conventional violence being decoupled from nuclear deterrence (75).
• Under the Kennedy administration, the United States became convinced that the threshold of violence that would trigger a nuclear attack was too high to provide deterrence against conventional attack, requiring a buildup of conventional forces in Europe to counter possible conventional Soviet attack (75-76).
• This conclusion that a conventional war could become decoupled from nuclear war between two atomic powers was rejected by the European NATO allies, who strongly believed that the threat of strategic nuclear weapons would prevent any kind of conflict (76-77).