The Cold War has been over for two decades, yet the centrality of (nuclear) deterrence theory to strategic studies remains. Ideas like counterforce are still naturalized artifacts for academics and policymakers alike: not as much debated but refined by contemporaries. The logic of a “delicate balance of terror” outlived the superpower confrontation and has been transplanted into other issue areas, such as deterring terrorism or cyberattacks. Thusly the jargon of cold warriors is still a prominent feature of contemporary US defense policy, along with its biases. Though claims about the laws of a non-event like nuclear war are still highly problematic, something makes these ideas “sound right”. The paper problematizes the historical contingency of these concepts by reinterpreting the realm of nuclear strategy making as an interpretative enterprise where a multitude of ideas compete. The power of ideas is most obvious in the act of naming: assigning names to phenomena, thereby enabling multiple avenues of actions. Naming constructs political deeds, which, when recognized, facilitate the deployment of language. Experts in this environment influence outcomes by rendering their ideas persuasive for other actors through framing. An analysis is conducted on a selection of hallmark RAND research on war limitation in the early 1960s, showing that the lasting impact of these ideas has less to do with their problematic correspondence to reality, than their versatility as carriers of “scientific” and “rational” storylines and their subsequent institutionalization.
