CAT Critical Reasoning Practice question with Solution 03

According to the author, the basis of the deterrence theory is that fear of retaliation keeps (deters) a potential aggressor from attacking. She further argues that maintaining deterrence requires maximum fear—that is, a potential aggressor must be so convinced of the invincibility of its potential opponent that it will lay low. From that, (D) must follow: A powerful nation seeking deterrence will want to let would-be aggressors know just how strong it really is; that knowledge is what makes deterrence work. It’s unlikely that you pre-phrased (D); what’s more likely is that after studying the stimulus, you proceeded to examine the five choices and (with luck) chose the right one.

Here’s why the others should have been bypassed:

(A)’s necessary condition—the “certain knowledge” of total destruction, signalled by “only if”—is not something to which the author is committed. Deterrence simply requires enough awareness of an opponent’s strength to make the potential aggressor think twice. (A) is too extreme to be a proper inference.

(B) offers a case in which military deterrence would not be in effect, because the aggressor nation believes itself to be mightier than its potential target. This doesn't mean such a nation will definitely attack the other nation for this reason alone, but we certainly can't infer, as (B) does, that this country won't attack.

(C) Oh yeah? An equally likely reason that one nation fails to attack another is that it (the first nation) simply isn’t warlike and has no designs on the other. (C) as written—implying that all peace is based only on fear of retaliation—is deeply cynical at best, loony at worst.

(E) makes a classic scope shift. The stimulus says that deterrence relies on aggressors believing that a nation has superior retaliatory power. (E) changes this to read that the defending nation must actually possess that power, a subtle but very important difference.

When attacking inference questions, avoid answer choices, such as (A) here, that are too extreme.