Crisis Management in the Nuclear Age (1987) / Chapter Skim
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Guidelines for Crisis Management
Guidelines for Crisis Management
Pages 26-35
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From page 26... ...
A second basic guideline is to avoid getting too close to the brink of nuclear war: The best form of crisis management is crisis prevention. President Kennedy believed that in the Cuban Missile Crisis there was a one-third to one-half chance of armed conflict, and thus some smaller chance of nuclear conflict.44 Although the danger of nuclear war may not have been great, it was too great for comfort.
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From page 27... ...
Such coercive uses of crises are tempting because time pressures may work to the advantage of the instigator, but they increase the danger of the situation.45 On the other hand, caution may be set aside so that a nation can seize an advantage, as the United States did during the Cuban Missile Crisis by using its naval superiority to force all six Soviet submarines in the region to the surface. Such bold actions in a crisis may have strong appeal, but they carry high risks.
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From page 28... ...
The Soviet Union received some compensation, however, and saved face because it received a guarantee from the United States never to invade Cuba, and the United States also agreed, although informally rather than as part of an explicit quid pro quo, to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey as part of the resolution of the crisis. A final guideline is for each side to be as clear as possible about its commitments and to communicate them in a timely and credible way to the other side.47 The Cuban Missile Crisis resulted in part from misunderstandings on this score, and although it is not possible to completely eliminate the sources of such misunderstandings, it should be possible to reduce their number.
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From page 29... ...
For example, the United States, the Soviet Union, and over 30 other nations signed the 1986 Stockholm Accords, which created verifiable mechanisms for the notification and observation of all significant military activities in Europe, including provisions for on-site inspections, in an effort to create a more open European military environment. In another forum, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START)
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From page 30... ...
Also recommended by the Weinberger report was a Joint Military Command Link, which would be a parallel hotline from the National Military Command Center in the United States to the comparable facility in the USSR. This would allow the communication and transmission of information, such as requests for clarifying information, at less than the head-of-state level.
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From page 31... ...
Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers Recent proposals to establish formal nuclear risk reduction centers in the United States and the Soviet Union represent an attempt to address several difficult problems of information, communication, and signaling through a new institution. Several variants have been suggested, one of which is to establish a center in each capital that is staffed around the clock by military and diplomatic personnel and regional specialists, that is linked to the other center by modern communications and video-conferencing, and that is perhaps also linked to the embassy of the other side through liaison officers.53 According to some advocates of such centers, they could become a focal point for a variety of actions intended to build confidence, facilitate communications, and avoid crises between the two sides.
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From page 32... ...
The centers were described by U.S. officials as a practical measure that could reduce the risk of miscalculation and conflict, but they are not expected to be used during crises for crisis management.54 POSSIBILITIES FOR UNILATERAL ACTION Even without cooperation from the other side, the United States and the Soviet Union can act to improve their collection and assessment of information, their methods of decision making, their command and control systems, and the clarity of the signals they send to the adversary.
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From page 33... ...
It makes sense to involve the high-level decision makers in preparing for crisis management by involving them in crisis management simulation games, as President Carter sometimes was, or by having them observe surrogates playing their roles, as President Reagan did in 1981.56 The main practical difficulty with this suggestion is that the president and other officials are often involved with pressing domestic and foreign issues and are unable to find time to deal with an imaginary international crisis. Beyond the problem of limited experience of the top leadership lies that of coordination of military and political policies and actions.
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From page 34... ...
Communication and Signaling For communication and signaling, practice may be a good teacher. Defense conditions and alerting measures are very complex and hard for an adversary to interpret, yet the exercises that the United States conducts are usually unilateral.
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From page 35... ...
GUIDELINES FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT 35 Second, and of more fundamental importance, signals are easily misread because of cultural and ideological differences between the sides and because it is hard to discriminate a signal from the noise represented by the welter of information available in a crisis. These possibilities for misunderstanding mean that it is very difficult for either side to improve signaling on its own.
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