Giving Compass' Take:

• James Acton et al. outline strategies to reduce the likelihood of nuclear arms races and/or escalation among countries with significant nuclear armaments. 

• Should the public be involved in decisions regarding national nuclear programs? How can you provideFive Strategies To Reduce The Risk of Nuclear Escalation support to policy and advocacy organizations supporting responsible management?

• Read about philanthropy's role in nuclear threat reduction. 

In January 2020, the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace initiated a new project to define a more promising future for arms control. We aim to mitigate acute nuclear risks by developing practical, concrete, and innovative ideas for interstate cooperation. In particular, we seek to catalyze the restart of U.S.-Russian risk-reduction efforts and to productively engage third parties, especially China.

The governments of China, Russia, and the United States all express support for arms control. However, they disagree profoundly about its purposes and preconditions. At the root of this disagreement is each state’s very different threat perception. These differences manifest themselves in two growing dangers that arms control could, in turn, help to address: nuclear arms racing, which exacerbates security dilemmas and interstate tensions, and inadvertent escalation, which could spark nuclear use should tensions spill over into war.

In a deep crisis or a conventional conflict between the United States and China or Russia, the concerns about force vulnerability that drive arms racing could spark inadvertent escalation. This risk is increasing as a result of the growing entanglement between the nuclear and nonnuclear domains. Such entanglement includes nonnuclear threats to nuclear forces and their command, control, communication, and intelligence (C3I) systems and a reliance on dual-use C3I capabilities. Unilateral responses to these dangers typically involve trade-offs between different escalation risks. For example, China’s development of a strategic early-warning system that could enable it to launch its nuclear forces before they were destroyed in an incoming attack creates the danger that it might mischaracterize a U.S. missile test as an attack.

This interim progress report lays out five near-term proposals. As a next step, we invite feedback from officials and experts in China, Russia, and the United States and its allies, as well as from all other states—after all, because the consequences of a U.S.-Chinese or a U.S.-Russian nuclear war would be global, every state has an interest in reducing its likelihood. After revising the proposals based on this feedback, we will publish them—along with more ambitious longer-term proposals—in late 2021.

The following five proposals are intended to reduce the risks of arms racing and inadvertent escalation:

• A U.S.-Russian data exchange for SLCMs and nonnuclear SLBGMs

• A U.S.-Russian transparency regime for empty actual or suspected warhead storage facilities

• A U.S.-Russian confidence-building regime for European Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defense installations

• A Chinese-U.S. fissile material cutoff and transparency regime

• A trilateral ballistic missile and space launch notification agreement

The first three proposals, which involve Russia and the United States, aim to manage capabilities that cannot realistically be limited in their next bilateral treaty. The fourth and fifth proposals aim to engage China with the objectives, respectively, of heading off a Chinese-U.S. arms race and reducing the danger that a missile test or space launch sparks escalation.