Civilians as "Hostages" in the Nuclear Deterrence Equation (1967)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Frederick Rockett's Crises Civil Defense and Deterrence makes a curious display of itself on it title page, what with no punctuation and all--same for the title page, though that changes a little to Crisis Civil Defense and Deterrence. With a comma here and there, the title changes meanings a bit.  In any event with my little screed over the document was published by the Hudson Institute in 1967 and is actually about how the Soviet Union, China and some other countries could reduce their vulnerability to nuclear attack by undertaking (emergency) civil defense precautions like large-scale evacuations and fallout protection. The author adopts a curious term here--"hostages"--to apply to the civilian population in relation to the nuclear policy of deterrence.  And what that means is that with increased numbers of civilians surviving there would be  a greater recover capability after a nuclear strike; in deterrence, enemy populations are part of the scheme, being seen as "hostages" to a nuclear strike and therefore a deterrent for that country to initiate an attack. With an increase in the number of survivors to an attack via the civil defense advancements there are fewer "hostages" and therefore the concept of deterrence is weakened, perhaps to the point where countries could begin to think of first-strike capacity with a more-protected population.

• [The original document is available for sale at the blog's bookstore, here.]

And so down the rabbit hole we go, discussing mine shaft gaps. This is five year after Dr. Strangelove, but this was very real stuff--and I imagine that if I were in a position to have to think about nuclear strikes and deterrence and etc., I probably would have been thinking in these terms, too.