Strategic stability is a concept in international relations indicating a lack of incentives for any party to initiate the nuclear first strike; the term is also used in a broader sense of the state of the international environment helping to avoid a war. Strategic stability characterizes the degree of the deterrence provided by mutual assured destruction and depends on the survivability of the strategic forces after the first strike.
Definition The meaning of the term depends on the context. Edward Warner, a U.S. Secretary of Defense's representative at the New START talks, has observed that the strategic stability can be defined at multiple levels, from the narrowest to the broadest:
The most narrow sense, described in the rest of this article – making the first strike less tempting in the event of a crisis (also known as crisis stability) and absence of incentives to build up the nuclear arsenals (avoiding the arms race instability) – is used by the nuclear-weapon states, including the United States, Even in this narrowest sense there is no universally agreed-upon definition of the strategic stability or ways to quantify it, as the vulnerabilities are country-specific; A broader sense describes the condition of no armed conflict between the nuclear powers; In its broadest sense strategic stability defines an international situation, not necessarily global, which is not conducive to an outbreak of a war. The governments, sometimes intentionally, make confusing references to the strategic stability:
the most consistent is the US government that typically uses the term in the context of reducing incentives to strike first, although occasionally the term is still used in a broader sense; the Russian government uses all three meanings listed above interchangeably; the position of China ranges from refusing to acknowledge the applicability of the term to the PRC (since, in the Chinese view, the stability requires at the minimum the nuclear balance) to the statements that the disarmament efforts shall have strategic stability and indivisibility of security as their goals.
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