De-Escalation of International Incidents Prone to Escalate Into Conflicts With the Use of WMD

Abstract

Even small military and political incidents between states have a potential of escalation towards inter-stat war with the use of conventional armed forces and further towards the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). To avoid such an escalation, a pre-planned windows of cooling down like pre-organized mechanisms for negotiations and talks between conflict sides are to be in-built in military strategies and war scenarios of the states. Nuclear weapons leave prohibitively short time-frame to decision-making on times of crises (sometime dozens of minutes only after receiving true or false signal on missile attack of the other side). Strategy of co called launch-on-warning are still applied practically by the two major nuclear superpowers, and that increase the risk of sliding quickly towards use of nuclear weapons in a moment of crises. It is time to stop to base nuclear options on such a risk-prone strategies. Historic cases of Suez crisis (1956), Berlin crisis (1961), Caribbean Missile Crisis (1962), periods within Arab-Israeli Doomsday War(1976), North Korean-American crisis of 2018, Iranian-American exchange of strikes and coercive actions in 2019-2020 allow to collect methods of stepping back from the dangerous thresholds, and create the arsenal of de-escalation measures. De-escalation measures must become a critically important component of national security strategies of major nuclear-weapons states.