SPRING 2016 Volume 10, No. 1 Commentary Thinking about Peace: Negative Terms versus Positive Outcomes Paul F. Diehl Red Lines and Green Lights: Iran, Nuclear Arms Control, and Nonproliferation James H. Lebovic Revealed Preference and the Minimum Requirements SPRING 2016 SPRING of Nuclear Deterrence Dallas Boyd NATO’s Readiness Action Plan: Strategic Benefits and Outstanding Challenges John-Michael Arnold Deterrence Adrift?: Mapping Conflict and Escalation in South Asia Ryan French Book Essay: Nuclear Weapons Redux Roger Gran Harrison Chief of Staff, US Air Force Gen Mark A. Welsh III, USAF Mission Statement Commander, Air Education and Strategic Studies Quarterly (SSQ ) is the strategic journal of the United Training Command States Air Force, fostering intellectual enrichment for national and in- Lt Gen Darryl L. Roberson, USAF ternational security professionals. SSQ provides a forum for critically Commander and President, Air University examining, informing, and debating national and international security Lt Gen Steven L. Kwast, USAF matters. Contributions to SSQ will explore strategic issues of current and Director and Publisher, Air Force Research Institute continuing interest to the US Air Force, the larger defense community, Allen G. Peck and our international partners. Editorial Staff Disclaimer Col W. Michael Guillot, USAF, Retired, Editor Ernest A. Rockwell, PhD, Content Editor The views and opinions expressed or implied in SSQ are those of the Vivian D. O’Neal, Prepress Production Manager authors and should not be construed as carrying the official sanction of Tammi K. Dacus, Editorial Assistant the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, Air Education and Train- Daniel M. Armstrong, Illustrator ing Command, Air University, or other agencies or departments of the US government. Advisors Gen Michael P. C. 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Springer, PhD Strategic Studies Quarterly (SSQ) (ISSN 1936-1815) is published View Strategic Studies Quarterly online at http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/ quarterly by Air University Press, Maxwell AFB, AL. Articles in Free Electronic Subscription SSQ may be reproduced free of charge. Notify editor and include a standard source credit line on each reprint. Strategic Studies Quarterly An Air Force-Sponsored Strategic Forum on National and International Security SPRING 2016 VOLUME 10, NO. 1 Commentary Thinking about Peace: Negative Terms versus Positive Outcomes ....................................... 3 Paul F. Diehl Feature Article Red Lines and Green Lights: Iran, Nuclear Arms Control, and Nonproliferation ....................... 10 James H. Lebovic Perspectives Revealed Preference and the Minimum Requirements of Nuclear Deterrence ..................................................................... 43 Dallas Boyd NATO’s Readiness Action Plan: Strategic Benefits and Outstanding Challenges .............................. 74 John-Michael Arnold Deterrence Adrift?: Mapping Conflict and Escalation in South Asia ........................ 106 Ryan French Book Essay Nuclear Weapons Redux ............................................................... 138 Roger Gran Harrison Book Reviews The Puzzle of Peace: The Evolution of Peace in the International System .......................................................... 143 Edited by: Gary Goertz, Paul F. Diehl, and Alexandru Balas Reviewed by: Derrick Frazier, PhD Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars .............. 145 By: Monica Duffy Toft Reviewed by: Capt Eric N. Ringelstetter, USAF Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict .................................. 147 By: Vipin Narang Reviewed by: Al Mauroni Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace ............ 148 By: Leon Panetta Reviewed by: W. Michael Guillot, USAF, Retired Is the American Century Over? ................................................... 150 By: Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Reviewed by: W. Michael Guillot, USAF, Retired Thinking about Peace Negative Terms versus Positive Outcomes “Peace is at hand” is a famous quotation from US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in October 1972, reflecting his belief that an agreement to end the Vietnam War was imminent. From the Thirty Years’ Peace treaty between Athens and Sparta in 440 BC to the Minsk Protocol between Ukraine, Russia, and two breakaway Ukrainian re- publics in 2014, so-called “peace” agreements have been used to halt military conflicts. What is common to all these instances is a narrow and negative conception of peace—as the absence of war. Such a definition is common, even dominant, in the way scholars and policy makers think about peace. In security analyses, war and peace are usually treated as a dichotomy. Widespread violence in civil conflict has to meet some threshold of se- verity to be labelled a war; all other situations that fail to exceed that threshold are categorized as peaceful. Prominent works on the decline of war argue that the world is more peaceful largely because of declining violent behavior—often measured in terms of battle deaths.1 Similarly, US military strategists and government policy makers think primarily in terms of negative peace. The early use of the phrase operations other than war reflected military doctrine that lumped together all noncon- ventional military applications. Its replacement, stability and support op- erations, is more nuanced in its treatment of the “nonwar” category, but the primary emphasis on stability—suppressing violent forces—places priority on negative peace outcomes. Indeed the 2014 US Army Field Manual (FM) 3-07 is titled simply Stability. Even in the Global Peace Index, created by the Institute for Economics and Peace, virtually every one of the 27 indicators of internal and external peace used to build an aggregate index of peace for every country deals with negative peace; some examples include the homicide rate, access to small arms, military expenditures, and involvement in external conflicts. Ending violence is certainly a laudable goal, but defining peace in negative terms leads to perverse outcomes for scholarly analysis and policy making. By most definitions, contemporary Iraq is not in a civil war (it falls short in battle deaths and other indicators of military en- gagement), but it is fallacious to regard the situation there as peaceful, Strategic Studies Quarterly ♦ Spring 2016 [ 3 ] Paul F. Diehl the outcome of US operations as desirable, or equivalent for analytical purposes to other countries with ethnic and other cleavages such as Can- ada. Similarly, US relations with North Korea should not be considered as peaceful merely because sustained military engagements have been absent since 1953. What scholars and policy makers need is a broader conception of peace. Why should policy makers care about such an ex- tension? Is this merely an esoteric discourse that hinges on semantical distinctions? A broader conception of peace has dramatic implications for the military and political actions that states might take, especially in postconflict contexts such as Iraq, and if such a stage is ever reached in Syria or Yemen. The absence of high levels of violent conflict is certainly a compo- nent of peace, but should not be considered the only one. There is no consensus on all the other elements of peace, and these might vary by context—state-state relations, national societies, and group interactions to name a few. Nevertheless, features of human rights, justice, and con- flict management are commonly cited and move the conceptualization beyond an exclusive focus on violence. Accordingly, peace involves a multiple series of interactions, an ongoing and longer-term relationship rather than an event such as a war. Thus, it needs to be assessed by refer- ence to a wide range of indicators and considerations. In addition, peace is also better understood as a continuum along which relationships vary rather than as a simple binary distinction with war. How can scholars and policy makers take a broader notion of peace and apply it to real-world cases? Specifically, one can look at war plans and conflictual interactions but also at diplomacy, communication, and functional integration. Based on this idea, a “peace scale” of five ideal type categories emerges along which relationships between states vary: severe rivalry, lesser rivalry, negative peace, warm peace, and security communities respectively.2 The two rivalry points (severe and lesser) reflect those states that are enemies to varying degrees and pose the greatest risks for conflict. Contemporary Indian–Pakistani relations