Quotes About Deterrence

Christ's work is a kind of deterrent to us, and a way of upholding the justice of God's divine government of the world.

To assert that military history suggested that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because sometimes good but naive men had done too little to deter them, was understandably seen as antithetical to a more enlightened understanding of human nature.

Armies are not only for offensives.

But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention, thereby clearly implying that virtue is capable of being taught.

There are a number of people who can't seem to realize that things could be mighty rough—even rougher than they are now—if there wasn't the slightest bit of deterrence.

To be sure, Americans, and American Air Force planners in particular, were the only people in the world who believed that they had won a war by bombing, and, particularly in Japan, by bombing civilians. But the nuclear era eventually put that demonic temptation—to deter, defeat, or punish an adversary by an operational capability to annihilate most of its civilian population—within the reach of many nations.

The implication—never questioned by anyone at RAND while I was there—was that adequate deterrence for the United States demanded a survivable, assured second-strike capability to kill more than the twenty million Soviet citizens who had died in World War II. That meant we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide, though none of us ever thought of it in those terms for a moment.

SAC's only mission in that initial period—which included the formation of NATO—was to threaten or carry out a U.S. first strike against the Soviet Union (possibly to protect Middle East oil, as well as Berlin and Western Europe). It was not at all to deter or retaliate for a nuclear attack on the United States or anywhere else, which was not then a physical possibility.

York posed the question, how many nuclear weapons are needed to deter an adversary rational enough to be deterred? Concurring with Bundy's judgment—as who would not?—he answered his question, "somewhere in the range of 1, 10, or 100 … closer to 1 than it is to 100." In 1986, the U.S. had 23,317 nuclear warheads and Russia had 40,159, for a total of 63,836 weapons.76

If there's one crime for which there has to be a certainty of punishment, it is gun violence.

The application of military force, or the prospect of such application, inhibits terrorist violence.

A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.

We need to send a clear message to gang members that violent crime will not be tolerated.

I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.

Punishers don't win. Thus, when repetition is taken into account, punishment by people who like to take the law into their own hands is ineffective.

The USA and the Soviet Union each had the ability to annihilate the other. Therefore- in theory at least-neither of these growling superpowers would dare attack the other, because to do so would result in its own immolation.

Radar, then, is the first step in making people decide that it's not worth it to mess with you.

And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.

States can be deterred by the fear of retaliation; non-state organisations cannot by deterred at all.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.

Our armed forces are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that this will happen before Israel goes under.

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

Sometimes at first light, while we were 'standing to', sections of our Machine Gun Platoon would open up on their fixed lines of defensive fire; this had a prophylactic effect to deter an enemy. It was often unkindly said, in jest, that the machine gunners were heating up their shaving water or maybe it was for their early morning tea. In any event, their shafts of short bursts of staccato firing were powerfully reassuring.