The Credibility Cliff: AI-Enabled Anti-Submarine Warfare and Anticipatory Posture Change in Asymmetric Nuclear Dyads
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/Keywords:
nuclear deterrence, anti-submarine warfare, second-strike capability, anticipatory posture change, artificial intelligence, asymmetric nuclear dyads, strategic stabilityAbstract
How do states behave when an emerging counterforce technology begins to erode the survivability of their nuclear deterrent before that erosion can be verified? This article develops two formal instruments for answering that question and illustrates them through AI-enabled anti-submarine warfare in the China–India–Pakistan strategic triangle. The credibility cliff is derived as the aggregated neutralization probability at which a state’s modeled deterrence condition ceases to hold, with retaliatory capability represented additively across sea-based and residual land and air legs. Its dual, the residual retaliation requirement, measures the survivability burden that adversary capability transfers onto the residual legs, and rises at a rate equal to the sea leg’s undegraded deliverable capacity. The Posture Reversion Mechanism derives, from expected-utility maximization over bounded beliefs, a reversion threshold preceding the structural threshold by an anticipation margin that increases with belief uncertainty. Parameters are calibrated from categorized open sources with an evidence cut-off of 31 December 2025, and Monte Carlo simulations propagate all author-assigned values alongside complete deterministic grids. India’s China-mission sea leg is cliff-exposed in 54.2 percent of draws (median threshold 0.45) and structurally insufficient in a further fifth; China is cliff-immune in every draw; and Pakistan, contrary to an earlier formulation of this framework, is cliff-immune under the sourced central survivability scenario, its sea-based program functioning as a hedge against declining land-leg survivability rather than as the foundation of assured retaliation. A two-player China–India interaction with Pakistan as the externality bearer yields, conditional on one explicitly named preference assumption whose role is quantified by the complete ordinal enumeration, an equilibrium that bilateral agreement does not resolve. The central finding is that AI-enabled anti-submarine warfare does not abolish assured retaliation but shifts the survivability burden at a calculable rate and devalues sea-based hedges before it disables sea-based deterrents.
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