How U.S. - Russian Tensions Can Go Nuclear (And Fast)

Russian military officials gaze into an intercontinental ballistic missile silo at an undisclosed location.
Photo AP (Image taken from MSNBC)

Bruce Blair, Politico: Could U.S.-Russia Tensions Go Nuclear?

Believe it or not, hair-trigger launch alerts are still with us—and perhaps even more dangerous than during the Cold War.

The Russian warplane recently shot down inside Turkey’s border with Syria fits a pattern of brinkmanship and inadvertence that is raising tensions and distrust between Russia and U.S.-led NATO. Low-level military encounters between Moscow and Washington are fanning escalatory sparks not witnessed since the Cold War. And there exists a small but steadily growing risk that this escalation could morph by design or inadvertence into a nuclear threat.

The backdrop for these concerns is that both the United States and Russia maintain their nuclear command posts and many hundreds of strategic nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert. This is a long-standing practice, or habit, driven by the inertia of the Cold War. The two sides adopted the accident-prone tactic known as launch-on-warning in order to ensure that their strategic forces could be fired before incoming warheads arrived. President Barack Obama’s recent nuclear employment guidance reiterated the need to preserve this option. Our nuclear command system and forces practice it several times a week. So do the Russians.

WNU editor: I grew up living in the shadow of this nuclear nightmare .... the idea that we are returning to those days fills me with dread.