MISUNDERSTANDING DETERRENCE:

Mattis owns a famously vast library, and he has said that, in coming to his new views on nuclear matters, he read many books on the subject. This kind of scholarly rigor has served him well in the past, but when Mattis commanded troops in Iraq, he saw connections between the battles he was fighting and the campaigns he'd studied in the classic volumes on strategy--because those volumes were based on what has actually worked and not worked across centuries of real warfare. If Mattis ever finds himself staring down the abyss of a nuclear war, he's likely to find the books he's consumed nearly useless; the scenarios they spin, however tightly, have no grounding in reality, as no one has ever fought this kind of war.

In a fundamental sense, Mattis seems to know this. At the hearing, he quoted a line from the Nuclear Posture Review stressing that the United States would use these weapons only "in the most extreme circumstances." He also noted that he never says "nuclear strategy" but rather "nuclear deterrence strategy," suggesting that the main goal is to deter nuclear war, not to fight one. This is assuring, but he also said that a deterrent isn't credible unless your opponent believes that you would actually use it--in other words, that you would retaliate to a nuclear strike with a nuclear counterstrike--and that, to foster this impression, you need plans and weapons that enable you to do this.

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