Nuclear deterrence, part II: False threats

In my previous post, I considered the argument against nuclear deterrence that says it’s wrong to gain a disposition to do something wrong, and a disposition to engage in nuclear retaliation is a disposition to dosmething wrong. I concluded that the argument is weaker than it seems.

Here I want to think about another argument againt nuclear deterrence under somewhat different assumptions. In the previous post, the assumption was that the leader is disposed to retaliate, but expects not to have to (because the deterrence is expected to work). But what about a case where the leader is not disposed to retaliate, but credibly threatens retaliation, while planning not to carry through the threat should the enemy attack?

It would be wrong, I take it, for the leader to promise to retaliate in such a case—that would be making a false promise. But threatening is not promising. Suppose that a clearly unarmed thief has grabbed your phone is about to run. (Their bathing suit makes it clear they are unarmed.) You pick up a realistic fake pistol, point it at the them, and yell: “Drop the phone!” This does not seem clearly morally wrong. And it doesn’t seem to necessarily become morally wrong (absent positive law against it) when the pistol is real as long as you have no intention or risk of firing (it is, of course, morally wrong to use lethal force merely to recover your property—though it apparently can be legal in Texas). The threat is a deception but not a lie. For, first, note, that you’re not even trying to get the thief to believe you will shoot them—just to scare them (fear requires a lot less than belief). Second, if the thief keeps on running and you don’t fire, the thief would not be right to feel betrayed by your words.

So, perhaps, it is permissible to threaten to do something that you don’t intend to do.

Still, there is a problem. For it seems that in threatening to something wrong, you are intentionally gaining a bad reputation, by making it appear like you are a wicked person who would shoot an unarmed thief or a wicked leader who would retaliate with an all-out nuclear strike. And maybe you have a duty not to intentionally gain a bad reputation.

Maybe you do have such a duty. But it is not clear to me that the leader who threatens nuclear retaliation or the person who pulls the fake or real pistol on the unarmed thief is intentionally gaining a bad reputation. For the action to work, it just has to create sufficient fear that one will carry out the threat, and that fear does not require one to think that the threatener would carry out the threat—a moderate epistemic probability might suffice.