Leadership Quote by Peter King

There is a lot of accidental candor packed into Peter King’s line: deterrence, he reminds us, isn’t some self-running machine. It’s a posture that requires a person, a committee, a president to actively imagine the unthinkable and then reserve the right to do it. The phrasing - “where we decide if we’re going to use it” - drags nuclear strategy out of the sterile realm of “capability” and “balance” and back into something more human and alarming: choice.

King’s intent reads like a blunt defense of keeping nuclear options on the table, especially in political moments when opponents frame nukes as purely symbolic or strictly last-resort. He’s insisting that a deterrent only deters if the adversary believes you might actually pull the trigger. The subtext is transactional and a little prosecutorial: if you publicly rule out use, you’ve quietly disarmed in the only way that matters - psychologically.

What makes the quote work, and also what makes it unsettling, is its unvarnished “we.” It collapses the distance between democratic governance and apocalyptic violence, as if the nuclear order is just another policy lever. In the post-Cold War U.S. context - where politicians often talk tough to signal seriousness on national security - the line functions as a loyalty test to hawkish credibility. It also reveals the central paradox of deterrence: to prevent catastrophe, you must keep catastrophe plausible.