Biden Takes Another Large Step Toward World War III (Or Worse)

I began studying nuclear war-fighting in 1969 and have continued my studies for decades. The scholarly materials I used in the late 1960s were mainly written in the late 1950s (after a decade of thermonuclear tests by the U.S. and the Soviet Union) and the early 1960s (informed by a near nuclear holocaust from the Cuban Missile Crisis).

The leading scholars of the time were Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, and Paul Nitze among others. New works are available (prominently Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen), but the older works are still highly relevant.

While the experts disagree in certain respects, they all agree on one thing: the most likely path to nuclear war is escalation. No one wakes up and says, “Nice day for a nuclear war. Let’s start one.” Instead, war will be the result of a process of one side raising the stakes, the other side responding in kind and escalating further, and so on in successive rounds until one party is backed into a corner and has no choice but to use nuclear weapons in an existential response.

Ironically, in that situation, the party that is less threatened may actually start the nuclear war in order get the first strike advantage. The result is annihilation; not just World War III, but possibly the end of human life on earth.

With this as background, it’s incomprehensible that Ukraine, backed by the U.S. and UK, are on an escalatory path with attacks against the world’s largest nuclear power – the Russian Federation. In the most recent escalation, Ukraine used UK supplied drones to strike at a radar system used by Russia to detect incoming nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The U.S. and Russia already adhere to what’s called the “launch on warning” doctrine. This means that if you detect incoming nuclear missiles, you don’t wait for them to hit their targets. Instead, you launch your counterattack as soon as you detect the missiles.

That puts the world on a hair-trigger. Hitting a radar facility that’s part of a nuclear defense creates a blind spot in that defense and makes the hair trigger even more sensitive and launch prone.

Ukraine is trying to drag the U.S. directly into the war with U.S. boots on the ground. Events may not get that far. We may be destroyed in a nuclear World War III if Ukrainian recklessness continues.

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