ABSTRACT
The interest of theorists and planners in post-Cold War Europe in non offensive defense is motivated by the desire to create a durable security community from the Atlantic to the Urals. Offensive military doctrines and forces poised for surprise attack reduce leaders’ confidence in the stability of the status quo. It follows that arms control should be used not only to reduce the size of potentially opposed forces in the region, but also to diminish the expectation of insecurity based on defenses vulnerable to surprise attack in the initial period of war. Non-offensive defense policies are open to either form of military strategy. There is no necessary contradiction between a state’s unwillingness to prepare for attack until it feels imminent threat, on the one hand, and its insistence on pre-emption once it does feel threatened. Nuclear weapons deployed in Europe during the Cold War, combined with US and Soviet security guarantees to allies, forced pre-emption-prone strategies on states whose policies, without superpower involvement, would have permitted less provocative stances.
