Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance

In the first three decades of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union threatened to use nuclear weapons against one another and against China. The term used to describe these threats depends on the frame of reference. Regardless of which country made the threat, the recipient called these threats "nuclear blackmail," while the aggressor referred to the threat as "coercion" or "deterrence." Betts uses unclassified documents from the 1940's to the 1970's to analyze the circumstances and results of nuclear threats made by the United States and the Soviet Union. He acknowledges that one primary weakness in his study was, "that there is no reliable evidence about what leaders in Moscow or Beijing were thinking during the crises," (p. 18) and as a result, "the evidence does not permit precise conclusions about the coercive efficacy of the nuclear signal," (p. 44). Overall the book is well researched. Betts extensively used the personal notes and tapes recordings of presidents and their top advisors from meetings during each crisis in addition to press releases, speeches, and policy statements from other books and articles. The sources the author used are well documented in footnotes that frequently take up a third of the page. For the benefit of the reader not familiar with the theories of nuclear deterrence, Betts starts off his book with a chapter that gives an introduction to the theories and doctrines of nuclear deterrence. He covers basic deterrence versus extended deterrence. In order to help categorize and explain each president's approach to nuclear threats, Betts outlines two basic nuclear strategies: risk maximizing (Russian Roulette) and risk minimizing (chess). In each of the cases that Betts examines, he refers back to these basic principles of deterrence and defines the president's actions in terms of the risk maximizing or risk minimizing approach. The cases examined in the book are divided into two groups: low-risk and high-risk. They also happen to be arranged chronologically with one exception (the Soviet-Chinese border clashes of 1969). Otherwise, all the cases categorized as low-risk occurred prior to or during 1958, and all the cases that were categorized as high-risk occurred after 1958. In the low-risk category, Betts discusses the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, the Asian Crises of 1954 through 1955, the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Lebanon and Taiwan Straits in 1958, and the Soviet-Chinese border clashes of 1969. What distinguishes these low-risk cases was that the nuclear threats were not made directly to a nuclear opponent, they were made over issues that were of secondary interest to the super power, and the threats were made from a position of nuclear superiority. In the high-risk category, Betts covers the Berlin Deadline Crisis of 1958-59, the Berlin Aide-Mémoire Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,