Nuclear Attack and Conventional Retaliation: Small States, Proliferation, and Nuclear War

Professor Tom Nichols of the Naval War College—and a research fellow of the the International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom—presented a paper titled "Nuclear Attack and Conventional Retaliation: Small States, Proliferation, and Nuclear War" on June 19, 2010, in Zurich, Switzerland, at an international conference on "Uncovering the Sources of Nuclear Behavior: Historical Dimensions of Nuclear Proliferation" sponsored by the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

How can large states deter small nuclear powers—and how should they respond if successfully attacked by a smaller aggressor with WMD, especially nuclear weapons? This paper considers conventional alternatives to in-kind nuclear retaliation, which may be impossible in the modern era.