This Is How A Nuclear War Happens. One Step At A Time.

The art and science of nuclear warfighting was a topic I studied in the late 1960s and early 1970s based on a lot of scholarly work that had been written in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The leading scholars were Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, Albert Wohlstetter and Paul Nitze. They took different approaches to various subtopics.

Some focused on what was called counter-force (targeting enemy missiles). Others focused on counter-value (targeting enemy cities). There were debates about first-strike strategy. This meant if you fired your missiles first and destroyed your enemy’s missiles before they could launch, you could theoretically “win” a nuclear war.

The answer was a second-strike capacity. This meant that if your enemy fired first, enough of your missiles would survive so that you could strike back.

The idea was that the second-strike capacity might deter the first-strike so that nuclear war could be prevented. This idea morphed into “mutual assured destruction” or MAD, which has been the main deterrent of nuclear war since the 1960s.

Of course, the need for second-strike capacity by both sides lead to a nuclear arm’s race. If I built enough missiles to have second-strike capacity, I might actually have enough to launch a first-strike, which would cause the other side to build more, and so on.

This dynamic was eventually mitigated by arms treaties and inspections in the 1980s. The entire field settled down, and the world has existed in a stable (if still dangerous) equilibrium ever since.

There are only eight nuclear powers today – U.S., Russia, China, France, the UK, Israel, India, and Pakistan. Iran and North Korea are knocking at the door of the club but are not quite at the stage of having deliverable nuclear weapons.

Along with this equilibrium has come complacency. Younger scholars and policymakers have never learned nuclear war-fighting doctrine in detail.

There is one important detail that is more important than all the rest that seems to be forgotten today. All of the 1950s scholars agreed that the most likely path to a nuclear war would be escalation.

No one would simply wake up and decide to start a nuclear war. No conventional war would begin on the assumption that it would go nuclear in time. Nuclear weapons would only be used at the end of a long process of escalation in which one side raised the ante, the other side raised it even higher, and the two sides kept escalating until one side perceived an existential threat and used nuclear weapons out of sheer desperation.

Avoiding escalation by nuclear-armed powers was the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but it seems to be forgotten today, especially by Joe Biden.

This article describes how Biden has agreed to send highly sophisticated missiles to Ukraine that are capable of striking deep into Russia from Ukrainian territory. Avoiding such an outcome was one of the reasons Russia invaded Ukraine in the first place.

Biden’s reckless escalation of an already dangerous confrontation is exactly how nuclear wars result. Biden is too cognitively impaired to realize this. His advisors don’t seem much better off.

Investors need to give nuclear war a 35% probability over the next twelve months. That’s the highest probability since 1962. Let’s hope it doesn’t get higher.

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