![]() ![]() While estimating the likelihood of such escalation is extremely difficult (if not impossible), the potential dangers are so extraordinary that the risks demand attention. Nuclear use could be a direct result or in less extreme circumstances, an escalating series of moves and countermoves-threats, signals, and conventional military operations-could plausibly result in nuclear use. In a crisis or conflict, pre-launch ambiguity could create serious risks of escalation by leading one state to misjudge its opponent’s willingness to use nuclear weapons or that opponent’s nuclear or nonnuclear capabilities. 7 By contrast, pre-launch ambiguity has been relatively prevalent, and its associated risks therefore deserve systematic analysis. nuclear attack on Hiroshima in 1945 when a nuclear-armed aircraft was presumably misperceived as being nonnuclear). 6 Fortunately, post-launch ambiguity has remained only a theoretical possibility (with the probable exception of the U.S. Controversy has surrounded, for example, the United States’ program to build a new nuclear-armed cruise missile, the Long-Range Standoff weapon, because of fears that Russia might wrongly conclude that a conventional cruise missile fired in anger was nuclear-armed and quickly respond in kind. Yet almost all of the academic and policy debates surrounding the consequences of such warhead ambiguity have focused on risks after an attack has been initiated (but before the warhead has detonated)-that is, on post-launch ambiguity. ![]() Indeed, that risk could recur in a future U.S.–North Korean crisis. ![]() In each of these three events, which span the nuclear age, ambiguity about whether delivery systems were nuclear-armed generated a significant risk of escalation prior to any use of those weapons. military as “nuclear war maniacs.” 5 In a crisis or conflict, pre-launch ambiguity could create serious risks of escalation by leading one state to misjudge its opponent’s willingness to use nuclear weapons or that opponent’s nuclear or nonnuclear capabilities. ![]() Pyongyang claimed that the B1-B was nuclear-capable (if not actually nuclear-armed at the time), describing one exercise as a “nuclear bomb dropping drill” and another as a “surprise nuclear strike drill,” while branding the U.S. 4 Yet, if its statements can be believed, North Korea misinterpreted the signal. resolve,” but the signal was meant to be a purely conventional one: B1-B bombers ceased to have a nuclear mission in 1994 and were subsequently modified so they could not carry nuclear weapons. These operations were explicitly intended to be a “demonstration of U.S. In 2017, as U.S.–North Korean tensions spiraled more than twenty-five years after the Cold War’s conclusion, the United States conducted a series of exercises around the Korean Peninsula involving B1-B bombers. military drew up during the crisis, were based on intelligence that seriously underestimated Soviet capabilities to defend the island. 3 As a result, plans for the invasion of Cuba, which the U.S. intelligence spotted the cruise missiles but incorrectly assessed them to be conventionally armed. In other words, the United States conveyed its first nuclear threat with weapons that were incapable of enacting it and, in so doing, created a risk that Moscow could have interpreted this threat as a bluff.įourteen years later, in the summer of 1962, in the run-up to what would turn out to be the Cold War’s most dangerous moment, the Soviet Union shipped about eighty coastal defense cruise missiles and their nuclear warheads to Cuba, along with the medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) that sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although all B-29s were theoretically capable of carrying an atomic bomb, the specific aircraft sent to Europe had not been modified to do so. officials did not lie, the overall impression they created was misleading. Official press releases described the aircraft as “atomic-capable.” 1 At the same time, a New York Times article based on “authoritative sources” reminded readers that it was B-29 bombers that had dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. president Harry Truman took pains to drive its point home. Although the intended meaning-that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend Europe-would likely have been obvious to the Soviet leadership, the administration of U.S. On July 15, 1948, three weeks after the Soviet Union had begun its blockade of Berlin, the United States announced the dispatch of B-29 bombers to Great Britain and Germany on what was officially described as a training exercise but was actually a message to Moscow. ![]()
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