Chris Gibson Quotes

Deterrence is part objective and part subjective. The objective part is that adequate military preparedness could be critical in some important circumstances. The subjective is, in part, the perception by the potential enemy of the other side’s power, determination, and courage, as well as its estimate of the wartime effectiveness of the other side’s relative nuclear capability. If the aggressor believes that his opponent has the weapons and will use them, deterrence is likely to be effective. Therefore, a nation’s defense lies, in part, in the credibility of its threat to use nuclear force as a last resort, which means that the need remains for coherent and plausible policies for the use of nuclear weapons.

The whole idea of deterrence is to convince your enemy that you are willing and able to make it so painful for them to continue on a threatening or bellicose course that they change their behavior.

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

Deterrence is the art of producing, in the mind of the enemy, the fear to attack.

One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.

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.

Deterrence is still fundamentally about influencing an actor's decisions. It is about a solid policy foundation. It is about credible capabilities. It is about what the U.S. and our allies as a whole can bring to bear in both a military and a nonmilitary sense.

States can be deterred by the fear of retaliation; non-state organisations cannot by deterred at all.

A credible threat of force is only as good as the political will to use it.

Knowing what an opponent values is a necessary condition for deterrence success.

There are contingency plans in the NATO doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon for demonstrative purposes, to demonstrate to the other side that they are exceeding the limits of toleration in the conventional area.

We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well.

Democrats always assure us that deterrence will work, but when the time comes to deter, they're against it.

The atom bomb was no 'great decision.' It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.

Israel always has to be in a position to defend itself against any adversary and against any threat of any kind.

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.

We have got thousands of nuclear weapons in order to achieve deterrence.

To be a major power, a country must have nuclear weapons.

The firmest security of peace is the preparation during peace of the defenses of war.

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.

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

The basic reason Russia has not attacked us is that we can outproduce her.

The nuclear threat is a direct product of the cult of force that has dominated the world for centuries.

… 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.

Instead of planning to deter would-be [nuclear] proliferators, U. S. policy makers have developed a preference for preventative war, They now seem to feel that deterrence is too weak to deal with radical regimes, forgetting that the precise purpose of deterrence is to counter dangerous enemies, not cautious ones.