Inadvertent Nuclear War?

Posen, Barry R.

doi:10.1515/9781400859528.332

Cited by 3 publications

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“…44. Other sources of unintended escalation include psychological factors in Jervis 1976, 67-78; on weapons usage and inadvertent escalation, see Posen 1982; on bureaucratic culture and norms, see Legro 1994. unacceptable political costs for restraint. One source driving deepening involvement can be domestic politics.…”

Section: Secrecy Intervention and Limited Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Facing Off and Saving Face: Covert Intervention and Escalation Management in the Korean War

Carson¹

2015

Int Org

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States pursue their cooperative and competitive goals using both public and private policy tools. Yet there is a profound mismatch between the depth, variety, and importance of covert activity and what scholars of International Relations (IR) know about it. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how adversaries struggle for influence within the covert sphere, why they often retreat to it, and when they abandon it. It focuses on secrecy among adversaries intervening in local conflicts and develops a theory about secrecy's utility as a device for creating sustainable limits in war. Drawing on insights about secrecy and face-work from the sociologist Erving Goffman, I show that major powers individually and collectively conceal evidence of foreign involvement when the danger of unintended conflict escalation is acute. Doing so creates a kind of “backstage” in which adversaries can exceed limits on war without stimulating hard-to-resist pressure to escalate further. An important payoff of the theory is making sense of puzzling cases of forbearance: even though adversaries often know about their opponent's covert activity, they often abstain from publicizing it. Such “tacit collusion” arises when both sides seek to manage escalation risks even as they compete for power and refuse to capitulate. The article evaluates the theory via several nested cases of external intervention in the Korean War. Drawing on newly available materials documenting the covert air war between secretly deployed Soviet pilots and Western forces, the cases show how adversaries can successfully limit war by concealing activity from outside audiences. Beyond highlighting the promise in studying the covert realm in world politics, the article has important implications for scholarship on coercive bargaining, reputation, state uses of secrecy, and how regime type influences conflict behavior.

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Section: Secrecy Intervention and Limited Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 44. Other sources of unintended escalation include psychological factors in Jervis 1976, 67–78; on weapons usage and inadvertent escalation, see Posen 1982; on bureaucratic culture and norms, see Legro 1994. …”

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confidence: 99%

Facing Off and Saving Face: Covert Intervention and Escalation Management in the Korean War

Carson¹

2015

Int Org

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“…In addition, states are reluctant not to increase the use of tactical nuclear weapons since not to do so is to risk territorial conquest. Therefore, there exists an incentive for restraint and an awareness that the longer the game continues, the higher the cumulative probability of a spasmodic nuclear war (Posen, 1982).…”

Section: The Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling Choices in Nuclear Warfighting

Schofield

2012

Simulation & Gaming

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Two classroom simulations-SUPERPOWER CONFRONTATION and MULTIPOLAR ASIAN SIMULATION-are used to teach and test various aspects of the Borden versus Brodie debate on the Schelling versus Lanchester approach to nuclear conflict modeling and resolution. The author applies a Schelling test to segregate high from low empathic students, and assigns them to hard case positions in three simulations to test whether high empathy students can engage in tactic bargaining and whether low empathetic students are necessarily as escalation prone. He has a bipolar nuclear simulation that is an easy case for the Brodie set of assumptions about nuclear war, avoidance, and Schelling-esque tacit bargaining. He expects the system structure and high empathy leader selection to contain escalation, despite the temptation of relying on accelerated Single Integrated Operational Plan solutions and the counterincentive of diminished tacit bargaining through decapitation attacks. The second simulation is a multipolar nuclear simulation set in the near future of Asia, and emulates the Borden-esque logic of nuclear war as artillery exchanges, with a Lanchester square law logic encouraging rapid escalation, coupled with a selection for the most autistic leadership. The author expects rapid nuclear escalation under these structural and decision-making conditions. His conclusions are anecdotal, but seem to indicate, from student feedback during class discussions, that the failure to model fear may be a factor in undermining successful tacit bargaining by players, suggesting that Borden rather than Brodie better conceptualized nuclear conflict. Therefore, peace is about restraining war initiation, as there are great pressures for escalation once war is initiated.How would NATO employ nuclear weapons in the event of war? Two contrasting approaches, the slow escalation versus massive retaliation, each with their own rationales and intellectual and political proponents, have received the most theoretical attention. Classroom simulations, both to teach and test the competing hypotheses of their alternative approaches, have generally shown that after initial attempts at tacit bargaining fail, players will resort to massive retaliation. About 20 seminar students are assigned positions based on an empathy test to create most likely outcome conditions for two simulations, or tests, of these contrasting approaches. The findings suggest that under the best of circumstances, escalation is notoriously difficult to control. States should be very careful about initiating conflicts and then assuming that nuclear deterrence will hold up as well within in-war situations. If state decision makers are aware of this, then they will be reluctant to begin using nuclear weapons, and nuclear deterrence is therefore robust and peace enhancing.The simulations are also for the purposes of dynamic and interactive classroom teaching of three topics. First, students are taught two methods of warfighting, and then asked to choose between them and apply their choice in a simulatio...

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“…It is, in this conception, as if two duelists stand with guns loaded and cocked at each other’s heads yet proceed to have their fight with daggers instead (Jervis 1989:19–20). Others, like Barry Posen (1982), have argued that even though nuclear states may wish to limit their conflict to conventional weapons, actions that occur during wartime can lead to what he calls “inadvertent escalation.” In his “Cold War Turned Hot” example, NATO attacks near Soviet ballistic submarine bases could draw a nuclear response even though the aim of NATO is not to harm the strategically stabilizing Soviet submarine‐based missile arsenal (Posen 1982:29–30). Such an interaction would then escalate further as American targets were hit with nuclear weapons and a war that was supposed to be both limited and sub‐nuclear is now an apocalyptic doomsday.…”

Section: Nuclear Weapons In Waltz’s Structural Neo‐realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nuclear Weapons in Neo-Realist Theory

Krieger¹,

Roth

2007

Int Studies Review

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This essay identifies a difference of opinion over the role of nuclear weapons as an absolute deterrent as the basis for the theoretical disagreement between Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer regarding whether security is attained through the maintenance of the status quo or through the aggressive elimination of potential rivals. The essay traces the writings of both scholars over a period of decades to demonstrate how Waltz has come to regard nuclear weapons as making conquest so unprofitable that possessing them provides absolute security. It also shows how Mearsheimer holds a more ambiguous position on the deterrent strength of nuclear weapons, which helps to explain why he believes that states still seek security through offensive action. The essay offers a guide to show how these important theories influence and shape current policy debates over the proliferation of nuclear weapons to both state and nonstate actors.

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Inadvertent Nuclear War?

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Facing Off and Saving Face: Covert Intervention and Escalation Management in the Korean War

Facing Off and Saving Face: Covert Intervention and Escalation Management in the Korean War

Modeling Choices in Nuclear Warfighting

Nuclear Weapons in Neo-Realist Theory

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