The Path To Nuclear War Is Taken One Step At A Time.

I’ve studied nuclear warfighting doctrines and scenarios since the late 1960s. Most of the art of nuclear warfighting was developed in the 1950s by scholars such as Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, and Henry Kissinger.

Nuclear weapons were developed with such urgency at the end of World War II that it took theoretical reasoning about how to use them (if at all) ten years to catch up. Ironically, once the doctrines were developed, there was very little change. It’s as if the thinking was locked in a time capsule.

There were important developments in nuclear arms control in the 1970s and 1980s, but negotiations leading to important treaties were conducted within the framework of the prevailing doctrines. Little new was added to the theory even as important arms limitation treaties were signed. The main doctrines related to counter-force (aiming missiles at missiles), counter-value (aiming missiles at cities and critical infrastructure), first-strike, and second-strike (which depended on surviving a first strike).

One tenet that all of the theorists agreed on is that nuclear war would happen through a process of escalation. There was no doctrine or leader that suggested starting a nuclear war as a first step. It was always understood that nuclear war would result from a series of escalatory steps in a dynamic by which one side increased pressure, the other side responded in a more severe manner, the original actor escalated further, and so on until one side felt it had no choice but to use nuclear weapons for existential reasons.

At that point, the other actor sensing that its adversary was going to launch nuclear weapons might launch a preemptive first strike even though it had no original intention of doing so. Therefore, the key to avoiding nuclear war was to avoid escalation. And the key to that was to deescalate once the escalatory process had begun.

Sadly, our leaders are either ignoring or never learning these lessons. The escalatory dynamic is well underway between the U.S. and Russia around the War in Ukraine.

Russia began the invasion after years of provocation by the U.S. The U.S. and its allies responded with weapons deliveries. Russia responded with a tenacious assault on Ukraine’s ports. The U.S. delivered even more weapons and increased the sanctions. Along the way, Putin announced that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons.

Now, as described in this article, Russia has cut off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. Those countries are utterly dependent on Russian natural gas for their economies and for energy for civilian populations.

It’s not clear what retaliation the U.S. might take. What is clear is that neither side has taken any steps toward de-escalation. That means we’re still on the path to nuclear war.

Investors should prepare accordingly by reducing exposures to stocks and increasing allocations to cash, gold, hard assets and other asset classes that will retain value if the worst comes to pass.

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