plawolf
Lieutenant General
Unfortunately what you are saying doesn't make much sense because you don't seem to understand what brinksmanship is.
In brinksmanship, both sides knows full well the terrible consequences, but are both convinced the other will blink and back down first, thus giving themselves the advantage.
Just because disaster was averted once does not, by any rime or reason, indicate that the same outcome will prevail in other similar situations.
A good recent example of brinksmanship gone wrong was the shutdown of the US federal government when the republicans and decomcrats both thought the other side would cave but neither did.
I also wish people would stop using the Cuban missiles crisis (CMC) as a comparison. The two scenarios are so different as to make any comparison meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
Firstly, the CMC was a stand off. For the US to directly intervene in a cross straits shooting war would be US forces directly engaging Chinese forces in combat.
The second important distinction is that technology, tensions, timescales, level of delegation and thousands of other key factors are nothing like what it was during the 60s.
During the CMC, tensions were so high and technology so limited that the use of nuclear weapons was pretty much hard-wired into the SOP of both sides as soon as the first shot was fired in anger.
Technological limitations in communications and the incredibly short time-scales involved in a war in Europe meant tactical nuclear launch authority was delegated down the chain of command to commanders right on the front lines. That means as soon as full scale hostilities broke out, everyone will be obliged to launch because nobody has the time to wait and see if the incoming missiles and bombers are carrying nuclear or conventional payloads. As such, the last resort has pretty much become the first response.
Fast forward to today, and for both the US and China, only their respectic presidents can authorise a nuclear launch. The two are also not embroiled in a life and death struggle, so are less inclined to think incoming missiles are nuclear.
If the conflict is limited to none home territory targets only, both sides would also have the luxury of waiting for the missiles and bombs to hit first rather than being forced to second guess what those weapons may be carrying.
Because of all this, the scope for an accidental nuclear war is infinitely smaller than during the time of the CMC.
If we rule out an accidental nuclear escalation, then the choice to go nuclear would have to be a conscious and deliberate one. Everyone can apply game theory and their own assumptions and conditions, but that is all conjecture and assumption. If we go down that road, we will still be arguing about this until the next New Years if not longer.
The way I see it, only two things will be 100% guaranteed to trigger a nuclear launch by either side.
1) A direct nuclear attack by the other.
2) A concerted attempt by the other side to systematically take out their nuclear launch capabilities.
Nuclear carriers, as valuable as they are, simply don't qualify.
Say China sinks a USN super carrier with conventional weapons. For the US president to authorise a nuclear reprisal attack is 100% guaranteed to trigger a Chinese nuclear response. There is simply no two ways about that.
So it makes zero sense for the US president to go down that path as the outcome is both terrible beyond imagining and pretty much inescapable as soon as he gives the launch command. Faced with such monumentally high costs and the near certainty of that happening if he goes nuclear, it is simply beyond reason and logic for him to chose to continue down that path.
Both China and the US can make these same calculations, so the threat of a US nuclear response if China kills and US carrier is an empty one and everyone knows it.
That threat can only be used to bully non-nuclear states like Iran and North Korea into not trying to start something, but against a fellow nuclear power, M.A.D trumps those empty threats very easily.
That Diplomat Article would have made sense if instead of nuclear carriers, it used SSBNs as the subject. But as with most things the Diplomat publishes, their articles are driving by ideology and what happens to be trending rather than real logic or reason.
