One of the biggest questions surrounding the conflict in Ukraine is to what extent the shadow of nuclear war affects the degree of involvement by Western countries. Much of the literature in nuclear deterrence theory assumes the incentives of mutually assured destruction are strong enough to avoid a nuclear war, and hence the existence of nuclear capabilities in Russia and the West should not play much of a role in how the conflict progresses. But one paper by a late University of California Berkeley political scientist calls this theory into question.

On this episode, we discuss Robert Powell’s “Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power”. In it, Powell builds a model that explains how conflicts can lead to nuclear war even under mutually assured destruction, but also how threat of that war changes the dynamics of any conflict from the beginning. Both findings give us a number of insights into the current situation in Ukraine.