ABSTRACT
During the Cold War, and especially in the 1980s, there were some serious efforts in the academic and policy communities to study the question how a nuclear war could end. The first use of a nuclear weapon by one state against another since 1945 will create a tectonic shift in the expectations of policy makers and military planners worldwide. The termination of a nuclear war, as in any war, has both military-tactical and politico-strategic aspects. As related to problem of ending a nuclear war, theories of escalation control have several key propositions on offer: all are controversial, but none is self-evidently impossible. Russia's nuclear weapons deployed for use on intercontinental missiles or long range bombers are, according to Russian officials, under secure storage and control in peacetime. Assessment of the viability of command-control systems under the stress of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attacks is made difficult by the scarcity of reliable information in the public record.
