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In the bizarre interregnum since the US presidential elections, world leaders have been calling President-elect Donald Trump in Florida before his inauguration on January 20. Some of them worry that the ongoing war between an increasingly desperate Ukraine that kills a Russian general in Moscow as it did this week and an emboldened Russia could spin out of control through miscalculation. The darkest scenario is one that culminates in escalation when Russia detonates a nuclear weapon. How likely is such a scenario in the few weeks left before inauguration day?
The likelihood of nuclear escalation cannot be estimated. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945 are the only cases of the use of nuclear weapons. That strategy was deliberate, not a product of miscalculation, and can best be described as “escalate to de-escalate.” There is no case of nuclear escalation through miscalculation from conventional war to nuclear fighting. No estimate of likelihood has any validity unless there are a large enough number of cases to generate a probability distribution. Nuclear escalation occurs in a world of what Oxford University’s John Kay calls “radical uncertainty” in which historical information provides no reliable guidance.
One way to think about nuclear escalation in the context of Russia’s current war against Ukraine is to build scenarios in which Russia uses a nuclear weapon and then trace a logically compelling pathway back to the present. It then becomes possible to ask what conditions could enable such a pathway to escalation.
Read here the full article by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist
