For nearly eighty years, we imagined the world ending in a mushroom cloud. Think Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
How did we manage to avoid it? Most U.S. strategists placed their faith in deterrence. The logic seemed simple: scare them, keep them guessing, and convince them you’ll follow through. The United States built thousands of nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them, made sure other countries knew it, and demonstrated its willingness to use them. Being scary and steadfast was supposed to keep us safe.
Did It Work?
In one important sense, yes. The United States and Soviet Union never fought each other directly. But deterrence had another side, too. The nuclear standoff that kept the peace at the center also freed both superpowers to roam the periphery – through conventional force, covert action, and economic leverage – while their own arsenals kept them safe from direct retaliation.
The basic logic of this power imbalance was captured vividly in Carol Cohn’s iconoclastic essay “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” In 1984, Cohn participated in a summer program on nuclear strategic doctrine. There, a faculty member illustrated deterrence with a story about his seventeen-year-old son. Disapproving of his son’s television habits, he threatened to break his arm if the boy turned on the TV again. “That’s deterrence!” he concluded triumphantly.
Cohn found the analogy illuminating. The conventional image of deterrence is two roughly equal countries keeping each other in check through the threat of mutual harm. But here, a stronger party was threatening superior force simply to bend a weaker one to his will. For Cohn, that mismatch exposed something important about deterrence: the same power meant to prevent attack could also be used to get others to do what you want.
When you have the bigger stick, there is little incentive to negotiate or compromise. Over time, that power can make overreach tempting – leading to commitments and interventions that outpace what even a superpower can sustain, breeding resentment and, eventually, backlash.
With deterrence and conventional superiority keeping direct retaliation at bay, backlash is likely to take unconventional forms. These may come from state-sponsored groups or nonstate actors operating semi-autonomously. The United States learned that lesson the hard way on 9/11.
Even when deterrence appears to work, it is hardly foolproof. Accidents, false warnings, and miscalculation have many times brought the world dangerously close to the brink of catastrophe.
In 1995, Russia mistook a Norwegian research rocket for a U.S. submarine-launched missile, potentially the opening salvo of a decapitation strike, former White House science adviser John Holdren recounted in a recent Science History Podcast interview. Norway had warned Russia in advance, but the notification was misplaced. With only minutes to respond, Russian officials began the nuclear launch sequence before a senior commander recognized the mistake and halted it. Holdren notes that such moments reveal how much our ability to avoid nuclear catastrophe depends, to an uncomfortable extent, on who happens to be in charge and whether that individual has the judgment and restraint to stop it.
Whether it was deterrence or luck that got us here, neither is something we can count on for what comes next: an era of bioinsecurity.
Bioinsecurity is what happens when our ability to manipulate biology outpaces our ability to govern it: to manage its risks, contain its accidents, and defend against its deliberate misuse. Our capacity for destruction is now advancing faster than our capacity to restrain ourselves from using it. As sociobiologist Edward Wilson has vividly reminded us, “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.” But biotechnology’s version of this problem is more terrifically dangerous than that of nuclear physics.
Why?
Biological Insecurity Is Different
Nuclear weapons are difficult to hide, relatively easy to attribute, and concentrated in the hands of a small number of states. Biological threats enabled by emerging genetic technologies can come from many actors and directions, be very difficult to detect, and potentially impossible to attribute.
A biological attack may not look like an attack at all.
We cannot reliably deter an attacker we cannot identify. We cannot deter an accident. And we cannot deter a pandemic.
We Need to Think Beyond Deterrence
In his 1966 book Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling introduced the concept of “compellence” as part of his theory of coercion. Unlike deterrence, which aims to prevent an action, compellence seeks to induce action or change behavior. Schelling’s concept was fundamentally coercive, relying on initiating an action that would cease or lessen only if the opponent changed behavior. He described it as typically requiring “that the punishment be administered until the other acts, rather than if he acts.”
As we just discussed, the United States has extensive experience with compellence under the protection of deterrence. But, how can it compel other countries (and itself) to increase transparency around dangerous research, cooperate when suspicious biological events occur, accept monitoring and verification, and refrain from developing prohibited capabilities?
That is the central strategic problem of bioinsecurity.
Some argue that the answer is the United States maintaining its leadership in biotechnology, as the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology recommends. Staying ahead still matters for defense: no country can defend against every emerging biological threat, but technological leadership can help it anticipate, detect, and counter at least some of them.
Biotechnology is inherently dual-use and widely dispersed, with no reliable civilian-military boundary. The real risk is therefore not simply falling behind, but the diffusion and misuse of dangerous capabilities. Out-innovating rivals cannot solve that problem – and, amid uncertainty about capabilities and intentions, can fuel the very arms race it seeks to prevent.
Beyond Deterrence Toward Diplomacy
The nuclear age taught us to prevent catastrophe by making certain actions too dangerous to undertake. But deterrence also gave the superpowers room to pursue conflict below the nuclear threshold, through proxy wars, covert action, and conventional force. The biotechnology age may require something different: not just deterring dangerous behavior, but compelling responsible behavior.
The United States has long practiced coercive diplomacy through military power and economic pressure, exemplifying what Thomas Schelling called the “diplomacy of violence.” What it needs now is to complement that tradition with a different kind of compellence – grounded in diplomacy, negotiation, and compromise. How could it do so? Less powerful countries – including those now rising on the global stage – have long relied on such tools and have valuable lessons to offer. This approach is messier than the clean logic of mutually assured destruction. But perhaps that is fitting: the biological world is messier than the physical one, and our strategies must be as well.