Arms Control, Nuclear Crises, and the Psychology of Near-Miss Events

• In Event: Poster Session: International Security Theory and Concepts

Abstract

Why have Washington and Moscow, two long-time adversaries, often elected to cooperate to reduce the risks posed by nuclear weapons? Existing work offers many possible answers to this question, from economic considerations to the influence of mass politics to relations between individual leaders. An enduring conventional wisdom among both practitioners and scholars is that Cold War nuclear crises—events that almost resulted in nuclear use—forced Washington and Moscow to engage in arms control by bringing them to the brink of thermonuclear war. Russian academician Alexei Arbatov exemplifies this logic, writing that, “It took a series of dangerous nuclear crises …for the Soviet Union and the United States to realize the dangers they faced and the need for practical steps to prevent a global catastrophe.”

On the surface, this prevailing narrative seems right: In the five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, the United States and Soviet Union went from having virtually no arms control agreements in place to concluding the Hotline Agreement, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and the Outer Space Treaty. Yet during this same period, the U.S. nuclear arsenal grew by nearly 16% and the number of Soviet warheads almost tripled, undermining the idea that the fear of nuclear war led American and Soviet leaders to practice greater nuclear restraint. Moreover, arms control negotiations that had been ongoing prior to October 1962 at least temporarily ground to a halt.

While these and other discrepancies call for a clearer understanding of the impact of Cold War nuclear crises on arms control, no existing scholarship has yet analyzed this relationship in a systematic fashion. This paper fills this gap through a comparative analysis of three nuclear crises and their aftermath: the Cuban missile crisis, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War/DEFCON III alert, and the 1983 Able Archer exercise/Soviet war scare. To do so, it uses a unique analytical framework rooted in the cognitive psychology literature on “wake-up calls” and the conditions under which individuals change their behavior following near-miss events. With insights from the archival record, process-tracing, and interviews, it outlines U.S. leaders’ perceptions of the risk of nuclear use in these three crises; their emotional responses to them; their views about the probability of other, similar nuclear crises occurring in the future; and their approach to nuclear arms control before and after the incidents took place to determine whether these conditions were met.

A structured, focused comparison of the cases reveals that the conventional wisdom about the relationship between nuclear crises and arms control is not supported empirically. Correspondingly, this prevailing wisdom is of little value in predicting what may transpire after other nuclear crises in the future. Although the results support the view that nuclear crises have helped arms control succeed in some instances—such as by creating bureaucratic-political environments where institutional advocates can effectively promote arms control objectives —they also show that leaders who felt they successfully resolved a nuclear crisis—namely, by forcing their adversaries to back down—typically did not change their approach to managing nuclear danger in its aftermath. Correspondingly, what leaders believed about the utility of arms control agreements prior to nuclear crises had a greater bearing on whether they pursued them once a crisis was resolved than existing research suggests.

Together, these findings contribute to answering a bigger question in International Relations, namely: does the fear of nuclear use drive or inhibit nuclear diplomacy between Washington and Moscow? They also allow for a clearer assessment of the merits and deficiencies of the argument that states learn to manage nuclear weapons with greater restraint over time and with experience. From a policy perspective, these insights are particularly relevant to both scholars and practitioners seeking to strengthen nuclear security in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its attendant threat of nuclear use, which some experts assert could precipitate a revival of bilateral arms control. While the findings from this analysis show that this assumption cannot be treated as a foregone conclusion, they do point to opportunities for arms control advocates to more effectively promote their positions after crises that existing work has ignored.

Author

• Sarah Bidgood, King's College London, Defence Studies Department