ABSTRACT
Individually, each case represents a fascinating story of historical uniqueness. Yet taken together they allow something even more fascinating, at least to students of deterrence. They provide an imperfect, perhaps largely preliminary, but for the moment probably the best available, opportunity to distinguish historical uniqueness from the regularities of deterrence in small-to-largedyads.Theobservationsthatrestinthestudyoffiveselected cases are powerful and important. This is true particularly with respect to the voluminous yet empirically underdeveloped literature biased by the analytical primacy of nuclear deterrence. There is no ground for such a bias.
