Elbridge Colby, the US undersecretary of defense for policy, wants to make American nuclear threats more credible to make nuclear war less likely. However, achieving the first objective may undermine the second.

In recent remarks to the US Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium, Colby outlined an emerging approach to deterrence built around providing the US president with credible and "rational" military options.

Colby's core proposition is that deterrence is credible only when political leaders have a broad range of military options to respond to aggression without ever being forced to choose between accepting defeat and initiating catastrophic nuclear war.