Thomas Schelling Quotes

… deterrence success is heavily dependent both on signaling the adversary on your intentions and on that adversary interpreting your signals correctly. Communications, through words and deeds, is thus central to a deterrence relationship.

Deterrence is a dynamic, interactive process between at least two entities. Deterrence policies are predicated on threatening an adversary with pain if that adversary changes its behavior in ways that you find detrimental to your interests.

We should get back to the ... doctrine of brinkmanship, where everybody knows we have the power and will use it.

Richard Nixon, famously, conducted his foreign policy according to the 'madman theory': he tried to convince enemy leaders that he was irrational and volatile in an attempt to intimidate them. But this was a potentially useful approach to foreign policy only because it was an act.

Our capacity to retaliate must be, and is, massive in order to deter all forms of aggression.

We probably could more successfully resolve the North Korean nuclear threat through game-theoretic reasoning. We could successfully resolve what American leaders seem to perceive as an Iranian nuclear threat through game-theoretic reasoning.

There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons... But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway.

We have a moral imperative to keep up the search for something better than mutual assured destruction.

Threats must be credible if they are to influence the behavior of other states.

I would like to see invented a substance or a machine with such terrible power of mass destruction that war would thereby be made impossible forever.

Foreign policy works best when force and diplomacy are used together.

The United States does not believe in durable coexistence with a moral threat.

It’s better to negotiate with a soft voice and a loaded gun, than to negotiate with just a soft voice.

One of the great advances of our time is the recognition that one of the ways to prevent war is to deter it by having the will and the capacity to use force to punish the aggressor.

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

Most people are disturbed by the shift from deterrence to preemption but the fact is that in international relations, deterrence has a poor track record

The moral high ground in taking the first hit before attacking has been made obsolete by weapons of mass destruction….You cannot wait for a catastrophic event.

I built a nuclear option to get peace, not to have bombs. Our enemies learned that they could not destroy us.

Deterrence is a strategy for combining two competing goals: Countering an enemy and avoiding war.

To Moscow, it must seem that the Cold War is only half over, since the West’s deterrence posture, although muted, lives on.

It is not important what the other side says or means. What is important are the military capabilities of the other side.

If we can deter the Soviet Union, if we can deter North Korea, why on earth can't we deter Iran?

If people know you have the big bazooka, you probably don't have to use it.

I thought that in general we in the United States were too optimistic in believing that the Soviets might alter what had been for a long time, as a matter of fact for centuries, fundamental Russian policies in respect to the rest of the world.

But the same intelligence compels Germany to practise the same policy.