Nuclear War and the Luck of Prudence

Speaker: Christopher David LaRoche (Central European University)
Discussants: Richard Ned Lebow (King's College London) and Benoît Pelopidas (CERI, Sciences Po)

Abstract:
This seminar paper investigates the relationship between luck and prudence in nuclear crises. Focusing on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Christopher LaRoche argues luck and prudence were both necessary but insufficient factors in Cuba’s nonnuclear outcome. He reinterprets prudence as a kind of distributional luck: it requires that the right leaders make the right decisions in the right moment. On this account, prudence is dispositionally, situationally, and structurally scarce: few people meet prudence’s high standards; crises challenge it via stress and escalatory incentives; and democratic pressures select against it. The Cuban Missile Crisis was thus “doubly lucky”: 1) the right decisions were made at the right times and 2) several “close calls” did not inadvertently escalate the crisis past the point of no return.

The author then uses this analysis to examine the prospects for nuclear prudence in contemporary politics. Can our reliance on luck to avoid unwanted nuclear use be lessened by electing prudent leaders? LaRoche argues prudence is both unlikely to emerge in nuclear crises and insufficient if it does. Its two pathways—procedurally rational leadership and high reliability organizations—are challenged by three compounding problems. First, nuclear crises are doubly novel: they resist assimilation to prior experience and defeat the heuristic mental machinery or “mindware” that expertise depends on. Second, the rise of reactionary populism, partisan polarization, and personalist authoritarianism select against prudent leadership. Third, the organizational contexts of nuclear planning are increasingly tightly coupled, complex, and entangled in novel ways. Because of these compounding factors, the premises of “nuclear rationalism”—that nuclear weapons impose sufficient organizational or elite rationality on their possessors to avoid nuclear use—may be dangerously utopian.

If you would like to receive a copy of the draft paper ahead of the session, please email sterre.vanbuuren@sciencespo.fr