“To Deter Thereby”: Deterrence as Pushing Back That Prevents War
The highest function of military power is not to be used. Deterrence is pushing back that achieves its aim when swords stay in their sheaths.
Editorial board
The man who did not press the button
Shortly after midnight on 26 September 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker south of Moscow, where signals from Soviet early-warning satellites were monitored. Suddenly the alarms sounded and the system reported the launch of an American ballistic missile toward the Soviet Union, then four more.
Tension between the two powers was at its height. Less than four weeks earlier the Soviets had shot down a South Korean airliner. Military doctrine rested on immediate retaliation: if an attack was confirmed, the response would be launched before the missiles landed.
But Petrov paused over a detail that did not convince him. Why would America start a nuclear war with only five missiles? And why had ground radars confirmed nothing? He decided to treat it as a false alarm and did not report it as an attack. He waited long minutes, and no missiles fell.
It later emerged that the satellites had read sunlight reflecting off high clouds as missile launches. The world learned of the story only in 1998.
Deterrence prevents war as long as both sides are rational, but it can place the fate of humanity, for a single moment, on the judgment of a single man.
Source: Memoirs of General Yuri Votintsev (1998); Arms Control Association.
War is the most extreme and costly form of pushing back. So it would be natural to assume that the law of pushing back on the military field means fighting. But the Quranic text offers a more precise picture:
﴿وَأَعِدُّوا لَهُمْ مَا اسْتَطَعْتُمْ مِنْ قُوَّةٍ وَمِنْ رِبَاطِ الْخَيْلِ تُرْهِبُونَ بِهِ عَدُوَّ اللَّهِ وَعَدُوَّكُمْ﴾[الأنفال: 60]
“And prepare against them whatever you are able of strength and of steeds of war, by which you deter the enemy of God and your enemy.” (Al-Anfal 8:60)
The stated aim of preparation here is “by which you deter”: deterrence. The verse did not say “by which you fight”; it made the function of strength to stop the enemy from advancing. The very next verse follows: “And if they incline to peace, then incline to it, and rely upon God” (Al-Anfal 8:61). Preparation, then, leads to peace, not to war; strength is built so as not to be used.
War as a continuation of politics
Carl von Clausewitz established in “On War”, published after his death in 1832, that war is “the continuation of politics by other means”. War, that is, is not an end in itself but an instrument for achieving a political aim. This agrees with the check on pushing back that we set out: a war cut off from its political aim, which becomes an attempt to annihilate the adversary, leaves the meaning of pushing back for the meaning of extermination.
Thucydides’s trap
The Greek historian Thucydides wrote of the Peloponnesian War that what made it inevitable was “the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta”. The American political scientist Graham Allison borrowed the phrase in “Destined for War” (2017), studying sixteen cases over the past five centuries in which a rising power confronted an established one; he found that twelve of them ended in war.
This thesis gives a precise picture of military pushing back: the rising power pushes the established one from its position, the established power pushes the rising one back from catching up, and mutual fear raises the likelihood of war. But the critical reader should note two things. First, the selection and classification of the cases is debated among historians, and a different list would yield a different ratio. Second, Allison himself did not argue for inevitability; the purpose of his book was to show how the other four cases escaped war.
The Cold War: deterrence that worked, at a heavy price
The Cold War remains the clearest modern example of deterrence. The two superpowers possessed enough nuclear weapons for each to destroy the other, and yet no direct war broke out between them for four decades. Many scholars see mutual deterrence as a major reason why.
But fairness requires that we not turn this example into absolute proof of deterrence’s effectiveness. That era had moments when humanity came close to catastrophe, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. And the absence of direct war did not mean the absence of wars; they moved to other arenas whose peoples paid the price. Deterrence prevented the great war, but it did not prevent military contention; it changed its location.
In sum
Military pushing back reaches its highest form when it prevents war, not when it wages it. The preparation the verse commands is a means of deterrence, and inclining to peace is the goal whenever possible. Any reading of the law of pushing back that makes war an end or a value in itself is a reading that contradicts the very verse it cites.