William Langewiesche in the New York Times: Nuclear confrontation is fundamentally a form of communication — even after the first blows fall. Some in government see it as a language and revel in its complexity. This has been so ever since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 and the Soviet Union responded by testing its own device four years later. The ensuing dialogues have, with varying degrees of subtlety, involved tests, bans on tests, arms agreements, embargoes, clandestine and nonclandestine technology transfers and the occasional grand speech — a high-stakes conversation in which all sides have understood the fearsome price of miscommunication. These exchanges echo around the edges of a devil’s spiral. At the top of the spiral stand the preparations meant as deterrents. At the bottom stands all-out nuclear war.
The descent — in the language of nuclear war, an escalation — is shaped by grave uncertainties. How well do my enemies understand me, and how well do I understand them? Furthermore, how does my understanding of their understanding affect their understanding of me? These and similar questions stand like the endless images in opposing mirrors, but without diminishing in size. The threat they pose is immediate and real. It leaves us to grapple with the central truth of the nuclear age: The sole way for humanity to survive is to communicate clearly, to sustain that communication indefinitely and to understand how readily communications can be misunderstood. Crucial to handling the attendant distrust are fallback communications integral to the art of de-escalation — an art that has been neglected and is now dangerously foundering.
After the Cold War, the two great powers paid less attention to the matter. Surprise attacks were their main concern, but they assumed that the existing warning systems and retaliatory capabilities were sufficient to ward off such events. At the Pentagon, ambitious officers chose some other track to advance their careers. Terrorism, cyberwarfare, even global warming — that’s where the action lay.
But the conversation continued. Britain, France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan had already made their voices heard, then North Korea joined in, with Iran seemingly poised to follow, with all the chatter multiplying the opportunities for miscommunication. Now China, after years of contenting itself with a diminutive retaliatory arsenal, has changed its mind and is striving to rival the United States and Russia. All three countries are investing heavily in improvements to their nuclear arsenals, introducing new warheads and delivery vehicles, expanding into the fight into orbital space, integrating conventional weapons and cybertools into their nuclear warfighting capabilities, worrying about electromagnet pulses and stirring in heaps of subterfuge. Key arms-control treaties have expired or been abandoned, and there is little immediate hope for new ones. Having fallen from 70,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War to about 12,000 today, the global arsenal has begun again to grow, according to the Federation of American Scientists. The emphasis now is on smaller, more precise nuclear weapons meant to limit radioactive fallout and civilian deaths — just the sorts of warheads that countries might be tempted to use during a conventional battle and that also, when coupled with cyberattacks and advanced surveillance systems, arouse worldwide concerns that particularly the United States may achieve a practical first-strike capability. Whether justified or not, these concerns are destabilizing. They make adversaries distrustful. They undermine the conversation. They compress the spiral.
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