Strategic Stability Reconsidered: Prospects for Escalation and Nuclear War in the Middle East

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Russell, James A.
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2009-04-01
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Institut Français des Relations Internationales
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This paper addresses the prospect that nuclear weapons could be used in the Middle East - breaking the so-called "taboo" against the use of these weapons since the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 and which remained unbroken throughout the Cold War and continues to endure. It argues that unstable dynamics of the coercive bargaining framework surrounding Iran's nuclear program may be pushing the world closer toward the use of nuclear weapons than is generally realized - perhaps closer than any time since the Cuban missile crisis1 - and proposes a number of near- and longer-term scenarios to illustrate the ways in which structural uncertainties in the regional interstate bargaining framework could result in the use of nuclear weapons.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10945/11078
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.
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