Actually, the hostage idea is logically identical with the notion that a disarmament agreement between the major powers might be more efficacious (and probably more subject to technical control) if it related to defensive weapons and structures. To eschew defense is, in effect, to make hostages of your entire population without bothering to put them physically into the other’s possession. Thus we can put our children at the mercy of the Russians and receive similar power over Russian children not only by physically trading them, with enormous discomfort and breach of constitutional rights, but also by simply agreeing to leave them so unprotected that the other can do them as much damage where they are as if he had them in his grasp. Thus the “balance of terror” that is so often adverted to is—if, in fact, it exists and is stable—equivalent to a total exchange of all conceivable hostages.

DEFINE: Reframes the 'balance of terror' as a total exchange of hostages, achieved not by physical trading but by mutual exposure to destruction.

Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, loc. 315