ABSTRACT
The history of US strategic thought can largely be comprehended as the story of how Americans have tried to cope with nuclear dilemma by rejecting, abolishing, or mitigating it. This chapter not only illustrates the distinctive qualities of the US approach to military strategy in the cold war, in all its ethical as well as expediential dimensions; it also explains readers much about the moral and strategic issues of nuclear weapons that confront the whole world. The US has the principal responsibility in the Western security community for deterring and constraining Soviet aggression overseas as well as against itself, and it controls the preponderant nuclear strength relevant to this end. Regardless of whether it is explicitly conscious of the moral dimension of military strategy, US strategic thought impinges on all the moral issues raised by the nuclear dilemma. An analytical survey of this body of thought should be an exercise of moral inquiry as well as one of descriptive generalization.
