LONDON, July 10 — There is a peculiar kind of dread that comes with the knowledge that a machine, not a person, has briefly decided the world might be about to end. Intriguingly, the history of nuclear brinkmanship is as much a story of technical error as it is of political calculation. The systems designed to keep us safe have, on more than one occasion, nearly started a war nobody wanted.
The most famous near-miss of the Cold War remains the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev negotiated a path back from the precipice.
But the mechanics of the standoff were terrifyingly simple: two men, a handful of advisors, and the question of whether to launch. What has since been uncovered about subsequent incidents suggests the margin for error has always been thinner than the public knew.
The Rocket That Looked Like a Missile
On January 25, 1995, Russia’s early warning system briefly mistook a Norwegian research rocket for a US Trident missile. The alert cascaded up the chain of command. For a few minutes, the system saw what it was programmed to see: a potential first strike.
It was a technical failure, a glitch in the machine’s interpretation of the world, and it triggered a nuclear alert. The rocket was studying the aurora borealis.
The episode underscores how the science of detection—radar signatures, flight trajectories, atmospheric interference—can produce a false positive with existential consequences. The 1973 Yom Kippur War offered a different kind of danger. When the Soviet Union threatened to intervene on behalf of Egypt and Syria, the United States raised its nuclear alert level to DEFCON 3.
This was not a machine error; it was a deliberate signal, a piece of nuclear diplomacy. The message was clear: back off.
It worked, but the mechanism of escalation—one side raising its readiness, the other interpreting that as a hostile act—remains a central puzzle for strategists.
The Asian Nuclear Landscape
India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed since 1998, have exchanged threats during conflicts such as the 1999 Kargil War and the 2019 Pulwama crisis. The logic behind their deterrents is the same: the possession of the weapon is meant to prevent the other from conventional attack. The problem, as researchers have noted, is that the proximity of their forces and the speed of any future conflict leaves little room for the kind of back-channel negotiation that resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis.
North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017, with ongoing threats against South Korea and the US. The regime’s technical progress has been steady, moving from a presumed plutonium device to what analysts believe is a thermonuclear warhead.
The threats are not just rhetoric; they are backed by a demonstrated ability to test. The mechanism of deterrence here is asymmetric: a small, isolated state holds a large, modernised military alliance at risk.
A New Kind of War
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine marks the first time a nuclear-armed state has threatened nuclear use during a conventional war since the 1980s. This is a significant departure. During the Cold War, the threat was implicit: if you invade Europe, we will use nuclear weapons.
Now, the threat has been made explicit during an ongoing ground war, raising questions about the stability of deterrence itself. What researchers are watching closely is whether this normalises nuclear threats as a tool of conventional warfare, a dangerous precedent.
The history of nuclear threats is not a clean line from Hiroshima to today. It is a jagged path of miscalculation, technical error, and political bluff. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, demonstrated the weapon’s power.
Everything since has been an attempt to manage that power without using it again. The science behind the warning systems, the psychology of the leaders, the mechanics of the weapons themselves—all of it matters.
What happens next depends on whether the systems we have built to prevent war can keep pace with the new ways we are finding to threaten it.
