The next two chapters take a close look at the most dangerous coercive nuclear crises since 1945. In this chapter, we discuss nine nuclear coercion failures. These are cases in which countries openly brandished nuclear weapons but still failed to achieve their coercive objectives. The leaders who issued these ill-fated threats – particularly Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon, and Kim Jong Un – followed the nuclear coercionist playbook to the letter. They alerted nuclear forces, forward-deployed atomic weapons, and appeared willing to engage in nuclear conflict. This kind of brinkmanship behavior should make coercive nuclear threats effective, according to nuclear coercionist logic. However, in these cases, it did not.

This chapter illustrates two key features of nuclear skepticism theory. First, it shows that credibility problems in nuclear blackmail are pervasive. In all of the nuclear coercion failures analyzed in this chapter, targets questioned the credibility of atomic threats, albeit to varying degrees. Although it is often difficult to determine precisely why states dismissed threats as not credible, two problems associated with nuclear coercion – the high costs of carrying out nuclear threats and the relatively low stakes in coercive crises – seem to play an important role in most crises.

Second, this chapter underscores that brinkmanship is an imperfect solution to the credibility problem in nuclear coercion. In each instance of failed blackmail, countries tried to make nuclear threats believable. Yet targets nevertheless largely dismissed the possibility of nuclear escalation. Brinkmanship failed to pay coercive dividends, in part, because of signaling failures. Nuclear coercion theory assumes that nuclear signals are easily detected and interpreted. If one state manipulates the risk of nuclear war by alerting its nuclear forces, for example, the other side should notice and understand what the alert is meant to communicate. However, the evidence suggests that this view is overly optimistic. Consistent with our theory, the cases show that nuclear signals are sometimes misinterpreted or totally missed. That atomic threats fail in serious brinkmanship crises – not just in cases with a minimal nuclear dimension, like the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 – demonstrates that it is exceedingly difficult to engage in credible nuclear blackmail.