ABSTRACT
The cost of war had been rising since the Napoleonic Wars, as industrialisation made possible the mass production of weapons and the means of transporting and supplying large armies. Nuclear weapons have thus necessitated a radical transformation in thinking about war, as dramatic as the conceptual shifts in the physical sciences from a Ptolemaic geocentric world view to the heliocentric universe of Copernicus or from Newtonian physics to the physics of Einstein’s relativity theory. In the early days of the Alliance, deterrence rested primarily on nuclear weapons, reflecting both the initial short-lived Western monopoly and the subsequent more enduring Western reluctance to pay the high cost of seeking to match Soviet conventional force levels. The stability of deterrence depends on a balance of military power but this concept has undergone a significant change of meaning in the nuclear era. Traditionally, a conventional balance of power required that each side’s forces should be broadly matched in both quantity and quality.
