Eric S. Edelman and Franklin C. Miller

Reports of the death of nuclear deterrence are greatly exaggerated. Obituaries for nuclear weapons simply misapprehend the role these arms have played since 1945.

In “The Strange Defeat of Nuclear Deterrence” (July/August 2026), Rose Gottemoeller insists that nuclear weapons increasingly lack value and purpose. She argues that nuclear deterrence “is not working,” that “the possibility of nuclear escalation and retribution did not prevent conventional and hybrid war,” and that the U.S. nuclear triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, and strategic bomber aircraft “can do little to deter salvos of cheap drones.” She points to a number of recent examples to support this observation, including Ukraine’s successful attacks on Russian strategic bomber bases despite Russian doctrine stating that “a conventional attack on its strategic assets could provoke a nuclear response,” Iran’s attacks on Israel, and dangerous clashes between nuclear­armed rivals India and Pakistan.

These cases certainly show instances in which the possession of nuclear weapons has failed to deter the escalation of conventional conflict. At the same time, they represent a misunderstanding of the role nuclear weapons have played in the past and are supposed to play in the twenty-first century. Although these weapons may not prevent all levels of conventional conflict, they were never intended to do so. They are still successfully placing bounds on catastrophic aggression by states and staving off the greatest threat of all: the use of nuclear weapons and the potential of an all-out nuclear war.

THE INSTABILITY OF STABILITY

The primary role of nuclear weapons among the nine states that have these arms (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) is defensive: to deter a catastrophic attack on their homelands and, in the case of the United States and the United Kingdom, on their allies’ homelands as well. Principally, this means deterring a massive nuclear attack involving the large-scale use of a country’s nuclear arsenal, but also a limited nuclear attack. A second role is to deter other forms of catastrophic attacks carried out by nonnuclear means—a massive conventional attack, the use of other weapons of mass destruction, and even cyberattacks. In theory, a state could use nuclear weapons in a limited way to signal to an adversary that unless it changed course, it would face a major nuclear strike. Finally, nuclear weapons could be used offensively either to assist an aggressor’s conventional forces in overwhelming enemy defenses (as Soviet planners apparently envisioned during the Cold War) or as a shield to support conventional aggression against the territory of the ally of a nuclear state; for instance, if China imposed a blockade on Taiwan, it could threaten to use nuclear weapons if the United States tried to intervene, making U.S. leaders think twice before getting involved.

The scenarios that Gottemoeller cites to demonstrate the failure of nuclear deterrence don’t rise to the threshold of nuclear use as envisioned by the states that possess such weapons. In fact, in the case of fighting between India and Pakistan, it can be reasonably inferred that the prospect of nuclear use moderated strife not only in 2025 but also in 1999, 2001, and 2008. To suggest that the outbreak of conventional war makes nuclear weapons irrelevant links wholly independent variables. One could just as easily have postulated that had Ukraine retained nuclear weapons after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian President Vladimir Putin might never have seized Crimea or launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, or that Israel and the United States might have refrained from targeting Iran’s leadership in 2026 had Iran already acquired nuclear weapons.

Scholars have long observed that stability in the nuclear balance can lead to instability at the conventional or other lower levels of conflict. This, of course, was borne out by the experience of the Cold War, in which the United States found itself fighting proxy wars against communist guerrilla movements in Asia. Israel, which was thought to have acquired nuclear weapons by the late 1960s, was attacked by Egypt and Syria in 1973, and the Soviet Union found itself battling insurgents funded by the United States throughout the 1980s. Nobody concluded from that experience that nuclear strategic deterrence had failed.

Gottemoeller concedes in her funeral oration for the concept that “the possibility of nuclear retribution serves as the key deterrent to nuclear states” and that the nuclear arsenals of the powers holding them do “encourage restraint in certain circumstances.” Her skepticism seems to be directed less at the continuing strategic relevance of nuclear deterrence and more at the policy of nuclear modernization. She argues that the alleged failure of nuclear weapons to deter conflict at most levels of violence and the rise of new technologies buttress the case for “deterrence by denial” rather than what the political scientist Glenn Snyder in the 1950s described as “deterrence by punishment.” The United States (and by implication others), she argues, should invest in defenses and arms control. In her litany of cases of the supposed failure of nuclear deterrence, she highlights Israel’s reliance on its missile defense capabilities rather than its opaque nuclear deterrent in the conflicts with Iran over the past three years. Israel’s reliance on the threat of nuclear retribution, she writes, has “receded far from view.” This mixes nuclear apples with conventional oranges. Israel’s formidable defense capabilities (developed with U.S. financial assistance) have been dedicated to defending against Iran’s conventionally armed ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. If Iran had developed or were to develop nuclear weapons, Israel’s ability to inflict nuclear retaliation against Iran would undoubtedly come to the fore.

Defensive capabilities against both conventional and nuclear-armed missiles are important, and the United States should improve them to better complicate adversaries’ calculations and protect the American public should deterrence fail. They are not, however, a substitute for the long-deferred nuclear modernization that would replace with more modern systems the United States’ aging inventory of nuclear bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and ballistic missile submarines originally deployed in the Cold War, the importance of which Gottemoeller testified to only four years ago before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Strategic nuclear deterrence remains alive and well. Nuclear weapons are not and never have been all-purpose deterrents, and few people........

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