This NYT article is chilling.
Although I didn’t know Dale well, I had the good fortune to meet and interact with him during graduate school…
7 responses to “Nuclear war, again”
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One thing about the article: they hesitated to quantify the risk. Is it one in a thousand one in million etc? The many ways this conflict can spiral is unnerving, plus the fact that the Russians and NATO seem to be playing a different game operating under different assumptions.
I mean any risk is unacceptable and it is common sense to say that any escalation to a war would lead to a nuclear exchange and even some scenarios short of a war footing.
Maybe Biden thinks this is the Cuban Missile Crisis all over and Putin is the Soviet Union all over again.
I'm not so sure -
I agree that it's unnerving. That said, I'm not sure it's true that the two sides are acting under different assumptions. Our open supplying of weapons directly into the conflict zone would very plausibly have been treated as making us co-combatants with Ukraine in other circumstances, but the Russians are conspicuously not attacking arms convoys inside Poland despite their saber-rattling. Given the level of public support and elite unity in the west I think we'd almost certainly have got somewhat militarily involved if Russia was not a nuclear power, but western leadership has been crystal clear that we are not going to get involved, even though that means giving up strategic ambiguity that might otherwise somewhat-constrain Russia. As far as I can see the Cold War deterrence playbook is still being adhered to on both sides: we absolutely avoid direct NATO-Russia armed conflict, even as we do everything else short of it.
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Ted Postol (MIT professor emeritus, expert on missile systems) makes an important point in the four minutes following this timestamp: https://youtu.be/ppD_bhWODDc?t=4012
(Russian capabilities for detecting/interpreting missile attacks are a lot worse than those of the US, which bears on the potential for "accidental" nuclear war in the ways Postol mentions.)
This aspect of nuclear war–that, if it ever happens, it is not unlikely to get started because of some technical failure and/or miscalculation under pressure rather than due to an informed strategic decision–does not seem to get enough emphasis in discussions of nuclear war planning. They tend to make things seem more orderly and subject to rational calculation than they are in reality. The plans are scary enough, but at least they are plans; a lot of the danger in a situation like Ukraine comes from the fact that sustained periods of heightened uncertainty and fear can lead to strikes based on error in all sorts of readily imaginable ways.
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@ "the Cold War deterrence playbook is still being adhered to on both sides"
Agreed. E.g. Vietnam. Russia and China poured in weapons (very effective weapons – took a heavy toll of US aircraft, as well as infantry casualties) and other material assistance.
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"This aspect of nuclear war–that, if it ever happens, it is not unlikely to get started because of some technical failure and/or miscalculation under pressure rather than due to an informed strategic decision–does not seem to get enough emphasis in discussions of nuclear war planning."
I think it gets quite a lot of emphasis. See this discussion, for instance: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-10-15/beijings-nuclear-option . I think it's also a large part of why NATO is so leery about getting into a conventional war with Russia: it's not just that the Russians might intentionally escalate-to-deescalate, it's that fog of war could let the situation spiral out of control very quickly through misinterpretation.
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You said the concern is that "fog of war could let the situation spiral out of control very quickly through misinterpretation." I interpret Nick as saying that there are certain kinds of errors and miscalculations that are routinely underappreciated. There are two sorts of risk factors I would emphasize here: (1) as Nick noted, the risk that some computer glitch leads one side to believe the other side has launched a bunch of nuclear missiles, when it hasn't; in peace time, political and military leaders may assume this is just a glitch, but during a sustained conflict, they would be more likely to believe the computer was accurate; and (2) the risks that follow from delegation of the authority to launch nuclear weapons to field commanders; it is widely assumed that all countries delegate this authority to some extent, although it is not known how far down the chain this delegation goes; there is a serious risk that a commander who has such delegated authority might exercise such authority in situations not contemplated by strategic planners (e.g., a field commander in Eastern Europe loses all contact with his superiors or with D.C., and assumes that the Russians have launched a cyber attack as groundwork for an imminent nuclear strike). Daniel Ellsberg discusses these risks in his book, The Doomsday Machine. Where Nick says that discussions of war planning "tend to make things seem more orderly and subject to rational calculation than they are in reality," I would say that these discussions do so because they overemphasize the extent to which decisionmakers on both sides (a) have accurate facts about the other side's behavior [this is different from saying they correctly interpret accurate facts about the other side's behavior] and (b) have control over their subordinates whose fingers are on the nuclear trigger. Thus, as Nick says, these analyses create the illusion that decision makers on both sides have things under much more control than they actually do.
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I agree that there is (some) public awareness about the things you mention. Sorry, I was referring to the kind of thing Postol is talking about but I didn't spell that out unambiguously. Peaceful IR Realist has done this very nicely and I fully agree with their characterization.
These are very consequential aspects of nuclear weapons that are almost never mentioned in, say, a NY Times article on nuclear war, at least as far as I have seen. I'd be very glad to be wrong about this, so please let me know, David or anyone else, if you're aware of these issues being discussed in some influential forum that shapes public opinions about nuclear weapons. The only public figures I can think of who regularly mention these issues are Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. But their reach is obviously limited, and many people find their concerns easy to dismiss because of their political profiles.
I would guess that if the broader public knew how many plausible ways there are for a nuclear war get started largely due to technical error, and how close we have come in the past, we would be more concerned about the existence of nuclear weapons and skeptical of the illusion of control we get from much expert discussion. It would focus people's minds in evaluating foreign policy, strategic decisions, and comments from politicians that play relatively fast-and-loose with these issues.
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