False Sense of Supremacy: Emerging Technologies, the War in Ukraine, and the Risk of Nuclear Escalation

ABSTRACT

How will emerging technologies impact crisis escalation? What has been the escalatory – or de-escalatory – effect of emerging technologies in contemporary crises? And can the use of emerging technologies increase risks of nuclear use? To answer these questions, we use the ongoing war in Ukraine as a case study to identify how emerging technologies are being used in modern conflicts and the associated risks of escalation, potentially to include nuclear use. We argue that emerging technologies gave Russia a false sense of supremacy in the lead-up to the war in Ukraine and have largely failed to deliver Russia battlefield victories. As a result, Moscow has increased reliance on nuclear weapons and nuclear threats. This reliance could be exacerbated in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine when Russia is conventionally weakened. Therefore, it is not the technologies themselves that increase risks of escalation, but their impact on decisionmakers’ perceptions of the potential costs of offensive military operations and escalation. Nonetheless, the role of emerging technologies in Ukraine should not inspire complacency because of the impact of new actors, new escalation pathways, and compressed timescales. These trends will have implications for nuclear policy and require more inclusive approaches to risk reduction and arms control, to include an increased focus on behaviors rather than capabilities.

KEYWORDS:

• emerging technologies
• crisis stability
• Ukraine
• information distortion
• social media
• commercial off-the-shelf technologies

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to Suzanne Claeys and Reja Younis for their research assistance with this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ An alternate definition comes from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as denoting those technologies or scientific discoveries that are expected to reach maturity in the period 2020–2040; and are not yet widely in use or whose effects on defense [and] security are not entirely clear (NATO Science and Technology Organization [STO]).

² It is unsurprising that we have seen deep fake technology deployed by Russia in the war in Ukraine, due it its lower price tag (relative to other emerging technologies surveyed in our study) and its confluence with Russia’s subthreshold warfare doctrine. Furthermore, using AI to enhance active measures and influence campaigns is a natural outgrowth of Russia’s history of information operations.

³ In June 2022, the Russian military admitted that it is also using Lancet in Ukraine, possibly adding more fuel to the debate about the use of AI in this war, considering that this particular munition was advertised as “highly autonomous” for target identification and destruction (Tass 2022).