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The risks of “accidental” nuclear war between USA and Russia

Atomic-Bomb-SmAnalyzing and reducing the risks of inadvertent nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Insititute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
Flag-USASeth Baum, 10 Jan 13  “…..Background: Inadvertent Nuclear War
Inadvertent nuclear war as defined in this paper occurs when one nation mistakenly concludes that it is under attack and launches nuclear weapons in flag_Russiawhat it believes to be a counterattack. A US-Russia nuclear war would be a major global catastrophe since these countries still possess thousands of nuclear weapons. Despite the end of the Cold War, the risk remains. This paper develops a detailed mathematical “fault tree” model to analyze the ongoing risk of inadvertent US-Russia nuclear war.
The Fault Tree Model
A fault tree is a scheme for modeling events and conditions that could result in some final event. Here, the final event is inadvertent US-Russia nuclear war. Initial events could include research rockets, as in the 1995 Norwegian rocket incident, faulty computer chips, wild animal activity, and nuclear terrorist attacks. The nation that detects the initial event, US or Russia, then goes through decision procedures to evaluate the event and decide whether to launch nuclear weapons in response……

Annual Probability of Inadvertent US-Russia Nuclear War
The paper calculates the annual probability of inadvertent US-Russia nuclear war, meaning the probability of the war occurring during the course of a year. While much remains uncertain, the paper finds that there may still be significant risk of inadvertent US-Russia nuclear war. …..
Options For Risk Reduction
The paper considers two options for reducing the risk of inadvertent US-Russia nuclear war. First, each nation’s submarines with nuclear weapons could be moved further from the other’s border, to give the other nation more time to decide if an initial event is a real submarine-launched attack or a false alarm. Second, the nations could lower their level of alert for part of the time, so that they will be less likely to conclude that an initial event is an attack. Both options were found to reduce the risk of inadvertent nuclear war. However, before recommending these options, further analysis is needed to assess the effects they have on other risks, including intentional (non-inadvertent) nuclear war….. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/baum20130110

January 11, 2013 - Posted by | Russia, USA, weapons and war

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