【英文】美国国家公共政策研究院报告：在台湾海峡威慑中国（190页）

英文研究报告 2022年06月01日 08:12 管理员

In a 1979 address to an audience of Europeans and Americans, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called out the irrationality of the U.S. nuclear escalation deterrence threat with considerable candor: “If my analysis is correct we must face the fact that it is absurd to base the strategy of the West on the credibility of the threat of mutual suicide…and therefore I would say—what I might not say in office—that our European allies should not keep asking us to multiply strategic assurances that we cannot possibly mean, or if we do mean, we should not want to execute, because if we execute, we risk the destruction of civilization.”45 Nevertheless, the United States and NATO continued to expect that the possibility that events could be beyond control and the United States could illogically escalate to thermonuclear war (and had the capabilities to do so) would help deter Soviet leaders reliably.

The expected deterrence value of uncertainty clearly was not confined to academic discussions. The official NATO Handbook during the Cold War stated that the alliance’s nuclear deterrence intention was “leaving the enemy in doubt” about “the escalation process.”47 A now-declassified 1984 Department of Defense report entitled, Report on the Nuclear Posture of NATO, stated similarly that NATO’s response to Soviet aggression could take a variety of possible forms that would involve “a sequence of events” that posed “risks” for Moscow “which could not be determined in advance.”48 Perhaps more importantly, Secretary of State Dean Rusk employed this approach to deterrence, i.e., relying on the opponent’s expected fear of uncertain risk to provide reliable deterrent effect, in a direct exchange with the Soviet leadership. At a time of considerable U.S.