ABSTRACT
During the 1980s a growing number of alternative defense theorists in Western and Eastern Europe, North America, and elsewhere have begun designing a variety of military and nonmilitary strategies deliberately weak in offensive capability and exceptionally strong in purely defensive strength. Concerned by what they view as the unnecessarily threatening and provocative nature of nuclear deterrence, these strategists seek to reassert the vanishing distinction between defense and offense, protection and threat. Nonprovocative defense analysts leave in place a large arsenal with diverse capabilities and strategies for repelling an invader. Sweden provides a second model of a defense system with some applicability to nonoffensive strategies. The Swedish government has studied perhaps more seriously than any other country in the world the possibility of integrating a component of civilian-based defense in its “total defense” strategy. Some observers question whether citizen armies as advocated in nonoffensive defense strategies would unduly militarize the politics and culture of those nations adopting them.
