Crisis Management in the Nuclear Age (1987)

Summary: Despite 40 years of the nuclear arms race, the US and Soviet Union succeeded in avoiding nuclear war. Because the consequences of such a war would have been horrible, much time was spent examining the various sequences of events that might have led to nuclear war. The most likely path seemed to begin with either an international crisis directly involving the US and the Soviet Union or a regional crisis that involved critical US and Soviet interests or important superpower client states that could lead through a series of escalating actions to a war. This report explored the problem of keeping such crises from leading to nuclear war. It identified major technical, military, political, and organizational problems that could arise when crises involved the superpowers; analyzed of the difficulties involved in resolving such crises short of war; and, in light of this analysis, reviewed some suggestions for preventing or managing superpower crises.