Accidental Nuclear War: A Risk Assessment

Recent developments in strategic weaponry have led to increasing fears that the danger of war by acci dent or inadvertence is growing. In particular, the deployments of 'fast-attack' systems with short flight times, combined with the growing complexity and automation of strategic warning and command and control systems, has given rise to the belief that during a major international crisis there would be insuf ficient time to distinguish false alarms from an actual warning of an enemy attack. An examination of a mathematical model of the warning and launch sequence that would follow from a strategic alarm sug gests strongly that there would be almost no time to make such a decision unless a 'launch-on-warning' strategic posture were adopted. There is evidence to suggest that in fact both superpowers believe they would be forced to adopt such a policy in the event of a serious crisis. Given a 'launch-on-warning' pos ture, an examination of available data on false alarms provided by NORAD leads to the conclusion that a false alarm sufficiently severe to trigger a strategic attack would occur about 50% of the time during a lengthy crisis. This finding highlights the urgent need for the superpowers to undertake co-operative measures to reduce the risk of war by accident, including the dismantling of short flight time systems and undertaking major improvements in their ability to communicate and to co-ordinate their actions in time of crisis.