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Notes -
There are methodological problems with the chapter in that a lot of the unsuccessful threats they discuss are totally irrelevant to nuclear warfare. Nobody would believe that France would think about nuking Serbia if they didn't accept the Kosovo peace plan in 1993! Nuclear weapons are irrelevant to that scenario, as they are to the US vs Afghanistan in 2001.
In fact, they admit that coercive nuclear threats were explicitly made in the case of Suez (by Russia) and Cuba (by the US). Both these cases saw the threat-making party succeed. The US did indeed take costly actions to make its threat credible to the Soviets in the case of Cuba, dispersing its nuclear bomber force amongst civilian airports and keeping planes in the air 24/7. In the case of Suez, Khrushchev threatened nuclear attack against France and Britain.
That chapter makes a similar argument to: 'we examined 200 occasions of gun-owners making threats to see if having a gun made threats more credible. We found that most of the time they didn't have any effect - most of the time guns weren't present or even mentioned. There were two instances in which guns were actually being pointed at the other guy - in these occasions the threateners successfully compelled their targets. But most of the time owning guns doesn't help in securing obedience.'
The argument is technically valid but silly.
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