Effects of Credibility of Retaliation Threats in Deterring Smuggling of Nuclear Weapons

The prevalence of global supply chains demands speediness of freights moving across borders between nations. However, nuclear weapon smuggling still poses a significant risk to the United States, which requires a trade-off between cargo inspection and speedy transition. Retaliation threats and partial inspection could be used together to effectively deter such smuggling attempts. As a nontechnical version of Shan, X. and Zhuang, J. (2014a). Modeling credible retaliation in deterring smuggling of nuclear weapons: a three-stage game. Decision Analysis 11(1) 43–62, this chapter models credibility of retaliation threats against smuggling of nuclear weapons within the context of an attacker–defender game and find that a rational defender would not always carry out retaliation activities under the condition that (i) the reputation loss from non-credible retaliation threats is low, (ii) the reward for carrying out retaliation is low, or (iii) the retaliation costs are too much. In addition, we study the required inspection level in order to deter smuggling of nuclear weapons when the retaliation threats are non-credible. This research highlights the importance of studying the credibility of retaliation threats in attacker–defender interactions and provides some insights on strategic integration of partial inspection and retaliation threats in deterring nuclear smuggling.