Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

Chapter 5: The Goal of Preventing Escalatory DominationThe problem of securing strategic stability should be considered not just in the context of nuclearwarprevention, but also in the context of the inadmissibility of escalation-driven domination byone side in a severe political and military crisis, especially if the latter may develop into a nuclearconflict.It should be borne in mind that the United States, on a much larger scale than Russia, has devoteddecades to developing a body of theory on the applied aspects of crisis- and conflict-escalationwith explicit military components.One of the milestones in consideration of these problems was the 1965 publication of HermanKahn’s foundational “On Escalation.” Kahn worked at the Rand Corporation and later foundedthe Hudson Institute. “On Escalation” represented the findings of a series of studies he carriedout for the U.S. Department of Defense. In this work, experts were primarily intrigued by Kahn’sintroduction of the concept of the “escalation ladder” in crisis situations. The escalation ladderconsisted of 44 “steps” and six “thresholds.” The top threshold that followed the 38th step on theladder was the city-targeting threshold—that is, the commencement of the launching of nuclearstrikes on the adversary’s cities. 53 These R&D activities formed the basis for the development severaldecades ago of a system designed to gradually improve the combat readiness of U.S. militaryforces. In the political and the military stand-offs that occur during international political crisissituations, top U.S. leaders can send valuable signals to their opponents—as well to its allies andthe international community as a whole—regarding American intentions by manipulating thedegree of U.S. forces’ combat readiness.It is entirely possible that in a certain crisis situation, we may see Washington trying to use theprinciples and methods that provide for escalatory domination. (Such a perspective in the contextof U.S.-Sino relations has been seriously considered by Chinese theoreticians and practicalexperts over the past 10 to 15 years; this is primarily related to a potential crisis over Taiwan inwhich China, in order to exercise all its sovereign rights, decides to use military force. Chineseplans regarding the development of that nation’s strategic nuclear forces are largely aimed at theprevention of escalatory domination against China. These plans extend as high as the developmentof a number of tactical and technical characteristics of nuclear missiles, including landbasedmobile missile systems like DongFeng 31 and DongFeng 31A. Escalatory domination mayprimarily rest upon the advantages which the United States has tried to lock in for itself in theareas of strategic nuclear weapons and conventional weapons since the end of the Cold War andthe dissolution of the Soviet Union. Attempts to exert such domination may be extremely dangerousin a conflict or crisis situation.The best way for Russia to block attempts at escalatory domination is by ensuring the availabilityof thoroughly developed mechanisms for resolving conflicts and crisis situations, based onthe national Russian system of crisis management and the adequate military power of Russia. Itappears that the importance of the availability of a system of crisis management is belittled byRussian scientists and representatives of the state apparatus and the political class as a whole. Thistopic is barely covered by Russia’s conflict-study disciplines as a politological sub-discipline, due30Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions