Crisis stability games

This article investigates the problem of crisis stability in the context of conventional and nuclear warfare, with emphasis on the incentives for one or both sides to engage in a preemptive nuclear strike. The approach is to offer two enriched versions of a recently developed model of escalation, to solve the models, and to observe that game-theoretic solutions can change from nonpreemption to preemption, depending upon the specific game structure and upon the values of the parameters describing the outcomes.