To the Editors (Mark S. Bell writes):
Matthew Evangelista's article questions the wisdom of bringing Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella.”1 Such a policy should indeed be subject to scrutiny. Yet Evangelista's argument regarding nuclear deterrence is not wholly convincing.
Evangelista challenges the claim that “nuclear deterrence … preserved the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War” (p. 7). He argues that nuclear deterrence is “fragil[e]” (p. 39) and that “it is wrong to claim that deterrence worked” (p. 38). To support these conclusions, Evangelista offers two main claims. First, nuclear deterrence was “not tested in Cold War Europe” (p. 38): The Soviet Union had “no such intention” to invade Western Europe and there was not “something to deter” (p. 7). Second, nuclear weapons did not prevent crises and in fact made them more dangerous.
These claims cannot support the inference...