How dangerous are nuclear crises? What dynamics underpin how they unfold?

The Kargil War was what we term a ‘staircase crisis’—a crisis that exhibited incentives for first nuclear use, but in which the level of escalation was relatively controllable by the leaders involved.

The Kargil War was one of the few occasions that the world has come close to nuclear war, and perhaps second only to the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the risk of nuclear escalation