A Delicate Balance of Power

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“We have learned that the threat of massive destruction may deter an enemy only if there is a corresponding implicit promise of nondestruction in the event he complies, so that we must consider whether too great a capacity to strike him by surprise may induce him to strike first to avoid being disarmed by a first strike from us.” – Thomas Schelling

The words of Thomas Schelling were extremely relevant during the time period of intense conflict that was the Cold War. His fantastic analysis of the new manner of conflict explains why conflict happened the way it did during the Cold War. What he’s saying here is that if an enemy is threatened with being utterly destroyed, the enemy is unlikely to succumb to its fear and will likely attack. There must be a balance of power for there to be stasis. Where there is no balance of power and one nation can obliterate another’s ability to strike back, one must consider whether one will be attacked simply because of one’s power. Russia and the United States both became powerful enough to obliterate the other first and because of this conflict the policies and conflicts of the Cold War escalated. While fighting the Cold war, and now the War on Terror the American government succumbed to its fear of Communism and became more totalitarian using censorship and control in order to fight against Communism, which is ironic because it was the exact thing that we sought to prevent.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government feared communism and used a system of censorship and excessive control to stop communist ideas from spreading in the United States. The Red Scare is the best example of this fear. It was exemplified by “McCarthyism”, which was an anti-communist strategy used on the homefron...

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Shmoop Editorial Team. "Cold War: Cuban Missile Crisis to Detente" Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 28 Feb. 2012.

Shmoop Editorial Team. "Causes of the Cold War Timeline of Important Dates" Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 28 Feb. 2012.

Richard Hartley-Parkinson “‘I’m going to destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe’: British pair arrested in U.S. on terror charges over Twitter jokes” dailymail.co.uk 1:08 PM January 31st 2012. Web. 28 Feb. 2012.

Erin Burnett “DHS reading your tweets and Facebook posts? Paul Callan calls it ‘very, very frightening’” CNN. 10 Feb. 2012. Web. 28 Feb. 2012

Chuck Baldwin “First NDAA; Now Enemy Expatriation Act” Renew America. 13 Jan. 2012. Renew America. 28 Feb. 2012

United Nations. Human Rights Division. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 1998. 2 Nov. 2004

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