Powers to Hurt: Nuclear Risks, Domestic Politics, and Nuclear Command and Control
Open AccessNuclear weapons have the potential to dramatically change international relations, allowing nuclear powers to deter aggression by threatening to respond to attacks with massive destructive power. For nuclear threats to be credible, however, states must do two things: First, they must develop the capability to reliably carry out nuclear attacks. Second, nuclear powers must prevent unauthorized or accidental nuclear uses in peacetime, which allows them to reward an adversary’s compliance with restraint. The procedures, organizational design choices, and technologies that prevent unauthorized nuclear use in peacetime and enable authorized nuclear strikes in war are known as command and control systems, and they enable nuclear statecraft by giving political leaders the means to direct the actions of military nuclear forces. Yet these two aims—preventing unauthorized use and enabling authorized use—are often in tension. The strongest protections against unauthorized nuclear use can make it harder for states to follow through on deterrent threats. Weakening these protections can ensure that orders to carry out nuclear attacks will succeed, but at the increased risk of unauthorized use. How do states resolve this dilemma? The consensus in the security studies literature is that states favor weak constraints on unauthorized nuclear use when external threats are high. However, the prevailing theoretical approach cannot explain why states sometimes diverge from this logic. At various points in their histories, several nuclear weapons states have taken steps to strengthen barriers to unauthorized nuclear use even when the threats they faced either increased or remained stubbornly high. Why?This dissertation proposes and tests a novel explanation. In brief, the theory developed in this study argues that leaders sometimes refuse to weaken safeguards on unauthorized use because they can face countervailing risks that incentivize them to maintain or strengthen barriers to unauthorized use. Under some conditions, leaders can come to fear weakening safeguards on nuclear arsenals as much as they fear external threats.The theory developed in this dissertation proposes that leaders and their close advisers are highly responsive to two sources of risk: threats to their domestic political survival and nuclear “close calls.” First, the theory identifies a cluster of domestic institutions that affect leaders’ expectations about the costs and benefits associated with different approaches to safeguarding nuclear authority. Second, the theory argues that leaders’ preferences for stronger vs. weaker constraints on unauthorized use are affected by their exposure to dramatic events that heighten the perceived dangers of runaway escalation. This study’s empirical chapters demonstrate the explanatory power of this theory through two paired qualitative case studies of U.S. and Soviet decision making, drawing on declassified U.S. government documents and authoritative Russian-language sources. The first case study explains command and control decision making in the years leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The second examines the consequences of crises for decision making in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The findings in these case studies provide support for the theoretical framework and challenge widely accepted theories of nuclear decision making.
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