Revisiting Threats That Leave Something to Chance

• In Event: The Effectiveness of Coercion

Abstract

How do nuclear powers compete under the shadow of a nuclear war that threatens their mutual annihilation? Thomas Schelling proposed an elegant solution to the credibility dilemma at the heart of coercion between nuclear-armed adversaries: “threats that leave something to chance.” His theory of brinkmanship is simple and powerful, but, if true, it leaves the field with several theoretical and empirical puzzles. In the real world, leading scholars find, policymakers tend not to manipulate risk; nuclear powers fear losing control of their nuclear forces. Where then does brinkmanship risk come from in crises? Why would the theory not travel to conventional crises, where policymakers often weigh the risks of escalation and bargain accordingly? How do threats that leave something to chance actually work, if at all? If a coercer can signal that they are ‘out of control,’ why would a target believe that escalation was avoidable? And what of the role of non-nuclear powers, absent from traditional models, in generating nuclear risk? In this exploratory paper, Reid Pauly investigates these and other lingering puzzles about nuclear brinkmanship with examples from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1961 Berlin Crisis, and the 2017 Korean Missile Crisis. The project builds on important new work about nuclear coercion and speaks to broader literatures on nuclear strategy, command and control, crisis bargaining, escalation, and bureaucratic politics.

Author

• Reid Pauly, Brown University