Military A.I. causes Russia launch-on-warning, triggering accidental nuclear war.

Potential U.S. adversaries, such as Russia, take seriously the possibility that the United States might leverage its advantage in such technologies as AI to radically improve its counterforce capabilities. For the past several years, Russian military analysts have been engaged in a vociferous debate in the military press about the extent of their country’s strategic vulnerabilities.8 Their tendency to assume that current and future U.S. capabilities pose a dire threat to Russia’s security stokes these anxieties.

A major challenge of nuclear strategy is that adversaries may interpret one nation’s secure retaliatory forces as a first-strike threat or a doomsday machine and react accordingly. For instance, the Russians probably conceived of Status-6 as a last-ditch second-strike option exploiting AI to autonomously circumvent U.S. defenses, but Western observers interpreted it as a Strangelovean “cobalt bomb.” AI progress is also contributing to Russia’s doubling down on older types of systems with undesirable strategic properties. For example, with its RS-28 “Sarmat” missile, Russia is reinvesting in large, silobased ICBMs with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) warheads, a category of weapon it once planned to abandon under the now-defunct Strategic Arms Reduction Talks II treaty. Western strategic theory generally considers large MIRVed ICBMs to be destabilizing because they are ideal for preemptive strikes and are vulnerable to preemption.

At the dawn of the millennium, Moscow believed that it could ensure the survivability of its forces by emphasizing mobile ICBMs and scrapping large silo-based missiles inherited from the Soviet Union. However, Russian leaders’ anxieties about potential U.S. threats to the survivability of the mobile ICBMs seem to have changed this calculus and led them to try to ensure retaliation by launching during a U.S. attack instead of riding it out. This is tantamount to the adoption of a launch-under-attack posture that could place great pressure on Russian leaders to launch first in a crisis, increasing the chances of accidental escalation. The Russians recognize that the Sarmat silo would be unlikely to survive a preemptive attack on its own, so its survivability hinges on an associated active defense system, code-named “Mozyr’,” that would attempt to force enemy warheads to detonate at a slight distance from a silo, allowing it to survive the nuclear explosions.