Us Nato Russian Strategic Stability And The War In Ukraine

This paper analyzes the role of nuclear weapons in Russia’s war in Ukraine as well as the war’s impact on overall US/North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)–Russian strategic stability. Strategic stability refers to the existence of two conditions: (1) crisis stability, where there is no incentive for either country to conduct a first nuclear strike, and (2) arms race stability, where there is no incentive for either country to augment its nuclear arsenal to gain significant advantages over the other’s. The paper uses open-source data to analyze the immediate and longer-terms impacts of the Russo-Ukrainian war on both crisis stability and on arms race stability. Because many of the potential nuclear escalation pathways involve escalation from the use of conventional (non-nuclear) weapons, this paper also necessarily explores the interactions between conventional war and potential nuclear use.