The Move Toward Nuclear War Continues One Step At A Time.

Nuclear warfighting is a topic that has not received much attention since the late 1980s and the end of the Cold War. Of course, during the Cold War, it was a critical topic that attracted the time and attention of top scholars including Herman Kahn and Henry Kissinger.

There were debates about counter-force strategies (attacking enemy missiles), and counter-value strategies (attacking enemy cities and infrastructure). Scholars also debated first-strike strategies, where you attacked your enemy unexpectedly and destroyed their ability to strike back.

This led to second-strike capabilities, where you built enough missiles to strike back even if you were attacked first. This led to an arms race where both sides were building theoretical first-strike and second-strike capabilities at the same time and finally morphed into mutually assured destruction (MAD), where neither side would strike first because they knew they would be destroyed in return.

Along the way, the U.S. and Soviet Union (now Russia) developed the nuclear triad (land-based launchers, strategic bombers, and submarines) to increase survivability in the event of a first strike by the other side. They also developed multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs), which put multiple warheads inside a single missile to increase the attack capacity of each launcher. Eventually, the arms race was subdued by treaties.

The end of the Cold War removed a lot of the tension. That’s the good news. The bad news is that experts and policymakers either forgot or never learned the nuclear warfighting doctrines described.

The result is that they may be sleepwalking into a new nuclear war without even realizing it. The way this happens is through escalation.

No one starts out wanting or expecting a nuclear war. Instead, two sides confront each other, one side escalates, the other side retaliates, and so on until one side or the other is backed into a corner and uses tactical nuclear weapons as a last resort. In some scenarios, the side least likely to use nuclear weapons actually launches the first strike because they expect the other side to do so imminently.

The War in Ukraine has been on an escalatory path since the beginning. The U.S. and EU retaliated against the Russian invasion with extreme financial sanctions, sophisticated weapons shipments, shared intelligence, financial resources, and more. Russia has retaliated with reductions in natural gas shipments, diversion of oil from Europe to Asia, limits on grain exports, and other tactics.

The latest escalation is described in this article. A part of Russia called Kaliningrad is located on the Baltic Sea but is cut off from the rest of Russia by Lithuania, which is a member of NATO and the EU.

Lithuania has now imposed a ban on sanctioned items moving across its territory to supply Kaliningrad. Russia will find ways to supply Kaliningrad, probably by sea from St. Petersburg. Then Russia will retaliate against Lithuania and the EU with cyber-warfare and other forms of economic sabotage.

The point is that the escalation continues. And every day brings the world closer to nuclear war. No one in a position of Western leadership seems to be paying attention.

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