Risk of unintentional war generated by the arms race

The qualitative and quantitative arms race continuously generates new military options, thus delicate strategic stability is constantly challenged and undermined. The arms race may therefore create a propensity of the international strategic system to collapse due to incentives to pre-empt and to adopt launch-on-warning policies. In other words, it affects the crisis stability of the international system, thus aggravating the risk of nuclear war by miscalculation.

The secrecy surrounding new weapons developments leads the nuclear powers to infer the 'worst case' and to overreact; thus the arms race is accelerated. The risks involved in the current technological arms race derive mainly from: enhanced accuracy and yield (mainly due to multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles) of anti-intercontinental ballistic missile weapons, thus jeopardizing intercontinental ballistic missile invulnerability; anti-submarine warfare developments jeopardizing the submarine launched ballistic missile 'leg' of the strategic triad; shrinking warning time due to forward basing (efforts to counter intercontinental ballistic missile vulnerability by reconsidering possible ballistic missile defence measures may be misunderstood by the opponent); and even if the strategic systems are not as vulnerable as some observers assume, the mere perception of their vulnerability may lead to misjudgement and miscalculation. A grave threat is posed to the invulnerability of command, control and communications systems; this may offer temptations to launch a pre-emptive first-strike attack or to adopt launch-on-warning policies and predelegation measures, which aggravate the risk of unauthorized initiation of nuclear war. To a considerable extent the arms race is progressing on an incremental step-by-step basis lacking proper national and international control. It thus produces results that are often highly dysfunctional to both national security interests and international concerns for strategic stability.

It is clear that the risks arising from the arms race are not efficiently countered or checked by the mitigating factors. Although in the absence of an acute international crisis these risks are not liable to overthrow strategic stability at the present moment or in the foreseeable future, they are extremely alarming in the long run.