| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Power Potential | the relative capabilities or resources held by a state that are considered necessary to its asserting influence over others |
| Opportunity Costs | the concept in decision making theories that when the occasion arise to use resources, what is gained for one purpose is lost for other purposes, so that every choice entails the cost of some lost opportunity |
| Military-Industrial Complex | a term coined by U.S. president Eisenhower to describe the coalition among arms manufacturers, military bureaucracies, and top government officials that promotes defense expenditures for its own profit and power |
| Proliferation | the spread of weapon capabilities throughout the state system |
| Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) | an international agreement that seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons by prohibiting further nuclear weapons sales, acquisitions, or production |
| Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) | a technological innovation permitting many nuclear warheads to be delivered from a single missile |
| Smart Bombs | precision-guided military technology that enables a bomb to search for its target and detonate at the precise time it can do the most damage |
| Firebreak | the psychological barrier between conventional and nuclear war |
| Nuclear Winter | the expected freeze that would occur in the earth's climate from the fallout of smoke and dust in the event nuclear weapons were used, blocking out sunlight and destroying plant and animal life that survived the original blast |
| Compellence | a threat of force aimed at making an adversary grant concessions against its will |
| Brinkmanship | intentionally taking enormous risks in bargaining with an adversary in order to compel submission |
| Massive Retaliation | a policy of responding to any act of aggression with the most destructive capabilities available, including nuclear weapons |
| Countervalue Targeting Strategy | targeting strategic nuclear weapons against an enemy's most valued non-military resources, such as the people and industries located in its cities, rather than against its nuclear-weapons capabilities (known as counterforce targeting) |
| Deterrence | a strategy designed to dissuade an adversary from doing what it would otherwise do |
| Second-Strike Capability | a state's capacity to retaliate after absorbing a first-strike attack with weapons of mass destruction |
| Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) | a system of deterrence in which both sides possess the ability to survive a first day strike and launch a devastating retaliatory attack |
| Nuclear Utilization Theory (NUTs) | a body of strategic thought that claimed deterrent threats would be more credible if nuclear weapons were made more usable |
| Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) | a plan conceived by the Reagan administration to deploy an antiballistic missile system using space-based lasers that would destroy enemy nuclear missiles. However, the United States was unable to build a reliable ballistic missile defense during the remaining years of the Cold War |
| Preemption | a quick first-strike attack that seeks to defeat an adversary before it can organize a retaliatory response |
| Preventive War | a war undertaken to preclude an adversary from acquiring the capability to attack sometime in the future |
| Coercive Diplomacy | the use of threats or limited armed forces to persuade an adversary to alter its foreign and/or domestic policies |
| Ultimatum | a demand the contains a time limit for compliance and a threat of punishment for resistance |
| Military Intervention | overt or covert use of force by one or more countries that cross the border of another country in order to affect the target country's government and policies |
| Covert Operations | secret activities undertaken by a state outside its borders through clandestine means to achieve specific political or military goals |
| Economic Sanctions | the punitive use of trade or monetary measures, such as an embargo, to harm the economy of an enemy state in order to exercise influence over its policies |
| Security Dilemma | the propensity of armaments undertaken by one state for ostensibly defensive purposes to threaten other states, which arm in reaction, with the result that their national security declines as their arms increase |
Combine with other sets
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