Abstract
Nonnuclear weapons are increasingly able to threaten dual-use command, control, communication, and intelligence assets that are spaced based or distant from probable theaters of conflict. This form of “entanglement” between nuclear and nonnuclear capabilities creates the potential for Chinese or Russian nonnuclear strikes against the United States or U.S. strikes against either China or Russia to spark inadvertent nuclear escalation. Escalation pressures could be generated through crisis instability or through one of two newly identified mechanisms: “misinterpreted warning” or the “damage-limitation window.” The vulnerability of dual-use U.S. early-warning assets provides a concrete demonstration of the risks. These risks would be serious for two reasons. First, in a conventional conflict against the United States, China or Russia would have strong incentives to launch kinetic strikes on U.S. early-warning assets. Second, even limited strikes could undermine the United States' ability to monitor nuclear attacks by the adversary. Moreover, cyber interference with dual-use early-warning assets would create the additional danger of the target's misinterpreting cyber espionage as a destructive attack. Today, the only feasible starting point for efforts to reduce the escalation risks created by entanglement would be unilateral measures—in particular, organizational reform to ensure that those risks received adequate consideration in war planning, acquisition decisions, and crisis decisionmaking. Over the longer term, unilateral measures might pave the way for more challenging cooperative measures, such as agreed restrictions on threatening behavior.
Highlights
Posture Review contains a highly consequential threat that has been largely overlooked in the wave of commentary surrounding the document’s release: the United States warns potential adversaries that it would consider using nuclear weapons in the event of “signiacant nonnuclear strategic attacks . . . on U.S or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities.”[1]. This threat was motivated by the growing vulnerability of these assets—in particular, the United States’ nuclear command, control, communication, and intelligence (C3I or enabling) capabilities—to advanced nonnuclear weapons, and is presumably intended to deter attacks on them.[2]
The Nuclear Posture Review illustrates that nonnuclear attacks on nuclear forces and C3I capabilities could be highly escalatory, even to the point of directly sparking a nuclear war
Since the late 2000s, scholars have warned about the possibility of escalation in a U.S.-China conoict resulting from so-called crisis instability generated by actual or threatened U.S nonnuclear operations that were intended to suppress China’s conventional forces but inadvertently degraded its nuclear forces or associated C3I assets located in the theater of operations, leading Beijing to fear it was
Summary
Posture Review contains a highly consequential threat that has been largely overlooked in the wave of commentary surrounding the document’s release: the United States warns potential adversaries that it would consider using nuclear weapons in the event of “signiacant nonnuclear strategic attacks . . . on U.S or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities.”[1]. Entanglement could lead to escalation because both sides in a U.S.-Chinese or U.S.-Russian conoict could have strong incentives to attack the adversary’s dual-use C3I capabilities to undermine its nonnuclear operations.[8] As a result, over the course of a conventional war, the nuclear C3I systems of one or both of the belligerents could become severely degraded. Warnings about crisis instability have focused on the potential for U.S nonnuclear operations to degrade Chinese nuclear forces, but have identiaed the risk of inadvertent threats to China’s nuclear C3I capabilities located in the theater of operations.[10] These threats have received particular attention since the United States acknowledged, in 2013, that it seeks to defeat potential adversaries’ antiaccess/area-denial capabilities by holding relevant C3I assets at risk as part of the concept formerly known as AirSea Battle (which was renamed, in 2015, as the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons and has since been further developed).[11] If overlap exists between the communication systems for China’s land-based nuclear and nonnuclear missiles, as some analysts have suggested, China could mistake U.S strikes designed to disable its nonnuclear missiles as an attack against its nuclear forces.[12]. Cooperative risk-reduction would be desirable because, as this article emphasizes in the conclusion, the risks created by entanglement are likely to grow in the future, absent action to mitigate them
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call