ABSTRACT
The central issue of deterrence admits less elegant solutions in long struggle than during the Cold War. Deterrence in the sense of prevention through threatened punishment would not work with such people: they are unimpressed by America's military and political might except to the extent that it motivates them to kill Americans. The US did not exclude deterrence from its counter-terrorism policy but it also was not sufficiently confident in deterrence to count it as one of the three pillars of national policy. But as the scarcity of post-11 September attacks in North America and Europe has suggested that governments have provisionally got a grip on hard counterterrorism, American analysts have started to consider in greater depth how to re-conceive deterrence to meet terrorist threats particularly from weapons of mass destruction. Even if these challenges are well met, there are some persistent limits on how horizontal the counter-terrorism network can become at least in the current strategic environment.
