US must avoid ‘uncontrollable escalation’ into nuclear war with China and Russia, report says

Washington should aim to avoid a full-scale nuclear war if Beijing takes military action against Taiwan, experts say, but they disagree on how to achieve that goal, according to a US think tank report.

The report presents the responses of five academics to “strategic deterrence failure” scenarios involving nuclear strikes against US allies by Beijing and Moscow in the Indo-Pacific and Europe as they try to take Taiwan and Ukraine by military means.

It was released by the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies on Monday.

All of the authors agreed on the importance of avoiding a full-scale nuclear war if deterrence fails, but they disagreed on other strategic objectives.

Melanie Sisson, a fellow in the foreign policy programme’s Strobe Talbott Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution, identified only two US strategic objectives – preventing a general nuclear war and further nuclear detonations in any location.

Ankit Panda, Stanton senior fellow in the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also wrote that “no objective should be greater” for Washington than securing the survival of the country from the “prospect of uncontrollable escalation into a general nuclear war”.

Christopher Ford, professor of international relations and strategic studies at Missouri State University, and Rebecca Davis Gibbons, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine, both identified a range of secondary strategic objectives, along with avoiding nuclear war as the primary US goal.