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to avoid provoking an attack aimed at destroying that capability, or to prevent another state from forcing it to give up that capability. For example, after Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz became the head of the German navy in June 1897, he set out to build a fleet that could challenge British naval supremacy and allow Germany to pursue its ambitious Weltpolitik.11 He realized, however, that the German Navy would be vulnerable to a British attack in the early stages of its development; he referred to this as “the danger zone.” To prevent that outcome, he and other German leaders launched a propaganda campaign in which they falsely claimed that Berlin was building a fleet for defensive purposes—to protect Germany’s growing overseas trade—and that they had no intention of challenging the British navy.

Israel lied to the United States in the 1960s about its nascent nuclear weapons program because it feared that Washington would force the Jewish state to shut down the project if it acknowledged what was really going on at the Dimona nuclear complex. “This is one program,” Henry Kissinger wrote in 1969, “on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us.”12 Another case in point was when the Soviets placed offensive missiles in Cuba in 1963 after they had repeatedly assured the Kennedy administration that they would not take that dangerous step. Their hope was to present the president “with a fait accompli at some moment of Khrushchev’s choice,” without giving Kennedy reason to move against them before the missiles were installed.13

A state might also downplay or hide its military capabilities to minimize the chances that an adversary would counter them either by altering its strategy, building defenses, or racing to build more of the same kind of weapons. During World War I, for example, Britain secretly developed the tank to help break the stalemate on the Western Front. To help conceal that weapon from the Germans before it was used against them on the battlefield, British leaders told a series of lies. For example, they said it was a water tank designed to transport water to the front lines, not an armored fighting machine or a “landship,” which was the name they used behind closed doors; this is how the tank got its name. They also said that the manufacturing firm building the tanks was not involved in making armaments. Moreover, the British tried to make it appear during the manufacturing process that the tanks were headed for Russia, not the Western Front. Each machine “carried the legend ‘With Care to Petrograd’ in Russian letters 12 inches high.”14

This same logic was also at play in Moscow’s handling of its biological weapons during the last fifteen years of the Cold War.15 Despite signing the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention, which went into effect in March 1975, the Soviets violated that treaty by developing a massive biological weapons program. They did not simply conceal the program from the outside world, but lied about it as well. Moscow’s lying was most prominently on display in 1979, after about one hundred people died near Sverdlovsk after becoming infected with anthrax accidentally released from a biological weapons facility. The Soviets, hoping to avoid getting caught violating the convention, falsely claimed that the deaths were caused by contaminated meat. The ultimate goal in this case and the others described here is to surreptitiously gain and maintain a military advantage over rival states.

Third, a country’s leaders might downplay their hostile intentions toward another state to disguise an attack on it. Probably the best example of this phenomenon is Hitler’s efforts between 1933 and 1938 to convince the other European powers that he was committed to peace, when he was actually bent on war. “If it rests with Germany,” he said in August 1934, “war will not come again. This country has a more profound impression than any other of the evil that war causes.… In our belief Germany’s present-day problems cannot be settled by war.”16 And in a famous speech in the Berlin Sportpalast during the tension