(image source: Alex Shuper)
“Escalation dominance defines a situation in which a nation has the military capabilities that can contain or defeat an adversary at all levels of violence with the possible exception of the highest.”
– Reagan Administration’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, “Discriminate Deterrence,” 1988.
There is no greater strategic madness than the belief that nuclear superiority must be maintained at each rung of the nuclear ladder in order to maintain deterrence.
U.S. weapons technology was a major driver of escalation dominance throughout the 1950s and 1960s along with the belief that the Soviet Union would move to a level of nuclear conflict that the United States could not counter. “Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb” parodied these fears, and the arms control and disarmament developments of the 1970s and 1980s helped to defuse them.
Sadly, the Biden administration has taken a step that suggests a return to escalation dominance, which will spiral a Pentagon budget that will soon reach $1 trillion per year.
Read the full article here on Counterpunch
