The Cool War

We are living through a protracted nuclear crisis unlike any other in history. Unlike past nuclear crises in the Cold War, we can watch this one in near-real time due to the expansion of information technologies throughout the 2000's. Paradoxically, those new technologies themselves have become part of deterrence operations and nuclear crisis signalling with unpredictable effects. The reasons for this are directly related to the emergence of a Russian ideology in the 2000s that celebrated and practised integrated information warfare at all levels: political; military-strategic; and economic, including the use of nuclear forces for signalling. That ideology also demanded the subjugation of Ukraine and Western Europe. The United States and NATO partners were slow to react effectively to this state of affairs as Russian aggression progressively manifested itself, but as the crises worsened the U.S. and NATO improvised a series of responses that now holds Russia in check. The question is, for how long?

There is no significant nor detailed analysis of the nuclear dimensions of the present crisis for several reasons, beyond the fact we are still in the crisis itself. First, no other analyst has figured out how to exploit in a timely fashion the massive amount of data in the information environment that specifically relates to the movements and flourishing of Russian, American, French, and British nuclear forces. Second, the "stove piping' that occurs when analysts separate one crisis from another prevents them from looking at the context and trajectory that the crisis is part of. There is an entire parallel world of nuclear force manipulation and signalling that the public does not see. And the frequency of this activity massively exceeds that of similar activity during the Cold War. "The Cool War" argues that signalling using strategic nuclear forces, especially by the Putin regime, has gone on long before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and that it has a specific context in Russian ideology and strategy. This did not all of a sudden happen in February 2022, this is just when the main-stream Western media became aware of it. The United States has responded with impressive improvisation to deter Russian behaviour, but this is not systematic enough for the future. We need to understand these events and these mechanisms now, today. And we don't. We need to learn how these new mechanisms work and employ them effectively in the coming conflict with China and with other dangerous competitors.