Description
Extended Nuclear Deterrence (END) has made a comeback in European strategic discourses. Interestingly, we still lack an intellectual history of this category of nuclear discourse. Though it describes a type of deterrence practice which emerged in the mid-1950s, the concept itself did not enter academic and expert discourse until the late 1960s. Deterrence, without adjectives, was the word of choice. The concept assumed the existence of a natural referent object of deterrence, defined as the “homeland”. But the “homeland” is a political, not a geographic concept, without fixed boundaries. The paper makes the hypothesis that the END category emerged as a response to a sense of threat to the Western Hemisphere which led US strategists and policymakers to rethink their relation to their allies. This rethinking involved not simply a re-assessment of interest, but a re-definition of identity so as to construct clients as ontologically different from their patrons. This finding, if confirmed, has implications for the contemporary practice of END: if the homeland is to be protected, then to be protected too, deterrence clients must not simply convince their patron of a shared interests, but of a shared identity.
