Wes O’Donnell,
The United States and Russia have nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear war at least ten times (that we know of).
And with 12,700 nuclear weapons worldwide — thousands on hair-trigger alert and ready to launch at a moment’s notice — an accident is statistically guaranteed to happen eventually.
It was only through a combination of quick thinking, cool heads, and a lot of luck that we have not yet had an apocalypse-level nuclear exchange between our two nations.
But things just got a lot worse.
Angry with Western support of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Russia’s participation in the New START treaty last month, saying Russia could not accept U.S. inspections of its nuclear sites.
Now, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said Moscow has suspended sharing information about its nuclear forces with the United States, including notices about missile tests.
In response today, the U.S. declared that it has stopped sharing information about its strategic nuclear stockpile with Russia.
Finally, Putin announced both that he was stationing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, and that Russia will be mobilizing its Yars missile launchers across the Siberian region for military drills.
This series of events amounts to an escalation in a yet-to-happen nuclear war. These tit-for-tat “announcements” are meant to rattle the other party in this grotesque game of realpolitik.
But this game has real consequences.
This lack of communication between the world’s two largest nuclear powers means that, statistically, the probability of finding ourselves in an unwinnable war just went up.
In 1983, a Soviet satellite reported that five U.S. missiles were heading toward the Soviet Union. The Soviets prepared to launch a retaliatory nuclear attack on the U.S. and its NATO allies and was only stopped by a single Russian officer who reasoned that if it were a real U.S. attack, the Americans would attack with more than five missiles.
In these situations, communication is key.
The chances that one side will misinterpret the actions of another side as hostile or threatening, especially during wargaming scenarios or tests, could trigger the unthinkable.
Famed astronomer Carl Sagan worried in the 1980s that a small undetected comet or asteroid hitting the U.S. or Russia could be misinterpreted as a nuclear first strike. If the Tunguska blast had happened during the Cold War, you might not be here reading this right now.
What’s more, Russia’s pitiful conventional warfighting capability in Ukraine means that the country must rely increasingly on its nuclear deterrent.
Forecaster Peter Wildeford has crunched the numbers and found that the chance of an accidental nuclear incident happening in the next decade (2022–2032) is ~28%. Further, he estimates a ~5% chance that any given incident will escalate into a nuclear exchange.
His data is quite compelling, albeit depressing. This puts us between a 1 in 3 chance and a 1 in 4 chance that the world will have a nuclear incident in the next ten years — and a 1 in 20 chance of a nuclear exchange.
Not great odds.
However, Mr. Wildeford’s calculations, performed in 2022, don’t take into account the recent developments between the U.S. and Russia — specifically the cutoff of primary communication channels between the two nations.
Armed with this new information, and deteriorating relations between the two countries, it’s likely that Wildeford’s revised estimation would be much worse.
For their part, the United States has focused on several ways to prevent the outbreak of accidental nuclear war.
Some are diplomatic and some rely on technology:
First, the U.S. ensures that control of its nuclear arsenal rests in civilian hands. In theory, the President is the only person authorized to release nukes, but global stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons and the need for military flexibility encouraged greater delegation of nuclear control to the U.S. military.
Other policies have focused on mechanical safeguards to prevent accidental or unauthorized detonation, and initiatives like the Personnel Reliability Program, which is designed to weed out unstable or unreliable servicemembers who have nuclear weapons responsibilities.
Still, other ways rely on advancements in technology, and the reliance on early warning systems that can distinguish a real launch from a test.
But Russia doesn’t have these safeguards… At least not at the same level of technological sophistication as the U.S.
During Congressional testimony by nuclear research scholar Bruce Blair in 1997, he said “Russian control over its nuclear arsenal is tottering on the brink of collapse, raising the specter of the accidental, illicit and inadvertent use, or the theft, of Russian nuclear weapons and fissile materials.”
Knowing what we know now about widespread corruption found throughout Putin’s kleptocracy, the nuclear situation in Russia has likely gotten worse, not better, for safety.
Also, Russia’s battlefield command and control in Ukraine is a joke.
But when dealing with nukes, command and control problems could lead to incorrect information being transmitted, received, displayed, or complete early-warning system failures.
By the time Putin took over as Russian President in the early 2000s, the command system and communications networks that support nuclear operations were typically five or more years past due for an overhaul, with some components ten or more years past their design life.
Finally, Russia is no longer behaving as a civilized nation should in the 21st Century.
In my estimation, Russia is no longer a country, but a nuclear-armed rogue state — a nation that abuses its own people, supports cyberterrorism and proliferates weapons of mass destruction.
Historically, the U.S. doesn’t maintain diplomatic ties with rogue states.
How long before the Russian embassy in Washington D.C. is shuttered, and its diplomats sent home? And vice versa?
Fortunately, there are still deconfliction channels with which U.S. leaders might communicate with their Russian counterparts. These include CIA Director Bill Burns having a direct line to his counterpart at the SVR, and direct lines between U.S. Army General Mark Milley and Russian General Valery Gerasimov.
But these lines are more for pulling back and de-escalating from a conventional war, not so much the dreaded nuclear response in which decision-makers only have precious few minutes to make a launch decision.
So, are we at the highest risk of nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis?
That is hard to say from a statistical perspective. Wildeford suggests that we know for certain that there wasn’t any nuclear war between the Cuban Missile Crisis and now, so by definition any point of time with any non-zero risk would be the “highest risk of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis”.
But by and large, Russia’s folly in Ukraine, an intentional severance of communication, unscheduled tests and wargames, and command and control issues make this a very dangerous time in our lives.
Having to rely solely on quick thinking, cool heads, and a lot of luck for the survival of civilization is not a strategy that inspires hope for the future.