Deterrence Without Peace: Nuclear Weapons and the Rising Threshold of Warfare

Abstract

Nuclear weapons fundamentally changed the international political landscape, leading to the emergence of deterrence theory and the notion of the Long Peace. This paper challenges these claims, arguing that nuclear weapons facilitated a more violent and volatile international system rather than stability. Drawing on constructivist theory, this paper develops the Threshold of Violence framework – a normative model which asserts that nuclear weapons elevated the perceived upper limit of tolerable violence in international politics. This raised threshold generated three trends in the nuclear era: increased frequency of proxy wars, escalating levels of benefactor involvement, and greater severity of conflicts fought with conventional weapons in proxy states. This paper examines three case studies: the Spanish Civil War as a pre-nuclear baseline, the Korean War as an early nuclear-era proxy conflict, and the ongoing War in Ukraine. This analysis finds that nuclear weapons normalized conventional and proxy warfare by reclassifying them as ‘lesser’ forms of warfare, while dismissing the massive costs borne by proxy states. In doing so, the paper offers a normative reinterpretation of the Stability-Instability paradox and challenges the claim that nuclear deterrence has delivered peace