Psychology and the Fragility of Nuclear Deterrence

Nuclear deterrence is often treated as stable. In practice, it is conditionally stable and cognitively bounded. Under acute stress, decision-making degrades: attention narrows, uncertainty intensifies, and time pressure increases reliance on heuristics. We formalize a distortion function in which stress, bias, and loss sensitivity elevate perceptual and inferential error, while decision time mitigates it. Contemporary military systems compress decision time, increasing the likelihood that distortion exceeds a critical threshold. Deterrence persists only while this threshold is not crossed.