Strategic Stability during the Cold War and Beyond

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About the event: During the Cold War, after the advent of survivable second-strike nuclear capabilities, assured retaliation became the foundation of strategic stability. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had an incentive to strike first in a crisis. A stable “balance of terror” deflected superpower competition to areas of peripheral interest in the “Third World,” and created conditions for diplomacy to stabilize the arms race. Throughout the Cold War and for thirty years thereafter, this stability architecture prevailed. With China’s emergence as a peer nuclear power in the 2020s, however, a tripolar order is emerging amidst destabilizing new technologies and the erosion of the arms control regime. Two interlocking Cold War risks are being recast. First, the three powers are engaged in intensified competition over areas of vital, not peripheral interest—Ukraine and Taiwan. Second, while assured retaliation remains the sine qua non of strategic stability, the “balance of terror” is becoming less stable because of the revived incentive to strike first in a crisis. A first strike would occur in the ungoverned domains of cyberspace and outer space, most likely against nuclear command and control systems, and would be highly escalatory. Litwak elucidates these transformed Cold War risks and explains how they can be mitigated in this era of unmanaged tripolar competition.

About the speaker: Robert S. Litwak is a research professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs of George Washington University. He worked for 40 years at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he was senior vice president and director of international security studies. Litwak was a longtime consultant to the Los Alamos National Laboratory and served on the National Security Council staff as director for nonproliferation. He is author of Détente and the Nixon Doctrine, Rogue States and US Foreign Policy, Regime Change: US Strategy through the Prism of 9/11, and Outlier State: American Strategies to Change, Contain, Or Engage Regimes.