The Cool War: Strategic Signalling, the Information Battlespace, and the Future of Nuclear Deterrence

Global ConflictsRichard Martin

By Sean M. Maloney (Naval Institute Press, 2025)

Reviewed By Richard Martin, 24 November, 2025

Sean M. Maloney’s The Cool War: Nuclear Forces, Crisis Signaling, and the Russo-Ukraine War, 2014–2022 (Naval Institute Press, 2025) is one of the first major efforts to reinterpret nuclear crisis behaviour considering the profound transformations that have reshaped the global information environment since the end of the Cold War. Its stated subject is Russia’s use of nuclear signalling from the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, yet the book achieves much more. It offers a new conceptual vocabulary for understanding deterrence under twenty first century conditions. Maloney argues that the Cold War’s relatively structured and predictable signalling regime has dissolved and been replaced by what he terms the Cool War, a strategic condition in which nuclear forces, political communication, psychological operations, cyber activity, and conventional manoeuvres coexist and interact continuously within an information ecosystem that is global, saturated, participatory, and extraordinarily fast.

Maloney is exceptionally well qualified to undertake this work. He is widely recognized as one of Canada’s foremost historians of the Cold War, nuclear strategy, and modern warfare. His scholarship on Canada’s Cold War nuclear policies remains a benchmark for the field, illuminating the complexities of deterrence, alliance obligations, and national policy in an era of existential stakes. His detailed study of the United States Emergency War Plan and American nuclear strategy between 1945 and 1960 was formally recognized by the United States Air Force History Association, a distinction offered only to research of exceptional quality and significance. Maloney has authored numerous books, monographs, and peer reviewed studies on Cold War dynamics, counter insurgency, Afghanistan, including the Canadian Army’s operations, and contemporary military operations. As a professor of military history at the Royal Military College of Canada, he has spent decades teaching and mentoring future Canadian Armed Forces officers. His combination of deep historical grounding, operational literacy, and a long engagement with nuclear policy makes him uniquely suited to interpret the domain he calls the Cool War.

At the centre of the book lies a clear thesis. Nuclear deterrence now functions inside a global information system that shapes how signals are seen, interpreted, amplified, or distorted. Maloney argues that this information environment is not merely a backdrop to strategic competition. It is the battlespace in which competition unfolds. Visibility, perception, and interpretation have become as important as missile throw weight, platform survivability, or warhead yield. Strategic signalling has become continuous because the information environment is continuous. Nuclear forces are rarely silent. Their movements, exercises, deployments, alert statuses, and even their visibility carry meaning.

The structure of the book supports this thesis by dividing the narrative into three broad phases. The first section sets the historical and doctrinal background, tracing the evolution of Russian nuclear thinking, force structure, internal politics, ideology, and worldview after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Maloney shows how Russia’s leadership understood nuclear forces as essential tools for creating political leverage and compensating for perceived conventional inferiority. He also analyzes how NATO and the United States adjusted their own nuclear posture after 1991. This is vital because the Cool War is not a uniquely Russian phenomenon. The West participates in the same strategic environment and engages in signalling of its own.

The middle section is the empirical core of the book. Here Maloney reconstructs, often with day-by-day granularity, the nuclear-signalling dynamics of the Russo Ukrainian crisis. He examines Russian bomber flights, submarine manoeuvres, ICBM dispersals, strategic exercises, political escalations, and disinformation efforts. At the same time, he examines USAF-NATO bomber task forces, United States SSBN port calls, NORAD intercept patterns, aerial refuelling orbits, NC3I flights, and alliance communications. He demonstrates how both sides used signalling to influence the perceptions of the other, and how these signals intensified around decisive moments such as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the early weeks of the war, and the October 2022 overlap of Russia’s Grom nuclear exercise and NATO’s Steadfast Noon. Maloney interprets this latter episode as one of the most dangerous nuclear confrontations since the early 1960s.

The final section of the book draws conceptual conclusions. Maloney argues that nuclear signalling has become a constant feature of international politics. He contends that deterrence today cannot be understood without reference to the information environment in which signals appear. He concludes that nuclear forces are now used as communicative tools in addition to combat capabilities whose meaning depends on context and perception rather than on tightly defined doctrinal categories such as deterrence, compellence, or reassurance.

Where the book is most innovative is in its methodology. Maloney’s approach is rooted in the recognition that strategic intelligence has become globalized, decentralized, and distributed. The most important information about military movements often appears in open sources. Civilian ADS-B receivers track bomber flights. Amateur satellite analysts produce detailed imagery interpretation within hours. Ham radio operators identify unusual HF activity. Maritime enthusiasts monitor AIS transponders of naval and merchant ships. Social media users capture and circulate photographs of submarine port calls, missile convoy movements, and aircraft dispersals. Organizations such as the Institute for the Study of War provide daily analysis of military operations using open sources. Experts like Sal Mercogliano and Ward Carroll offer domain specific interpretation based on their professional backgrounds in merchant marine operations and naval aviation respectively. Such analysts contribute to a wider ecosystem that is often faster and more empirically grounded than traditional media reporting.

Maloney synthesizes this distributed intelligence environment into a coherent analytical framework. He does not treat isolated signals as significant in themselves but correlates them across multiple sources, aligns them with observable action, examines their temporal relationship to political statements, and interprets them against doctrinal contexts. His approach reflects a new reality. In a world where strategic actions are observed simultaneously by millions, analysis must integrate dispersed observations rather than rely exclusively on classified reporting.

This methodology is powerful, but it also contains vulnerabilities. The human mind is predisposed to detect patterns even when none exist. Cognitive scientists and anthropologists describe this as the hyperactive agency detection device. It is a cognitive mechanism that can lead analysts to infer intention where only coincidence exists. In an information environment filled with noise, contradiction, deception, and partial visibility, the risk of over interpretation is ever present. Maloney acknowledges this implicitly through careful triangulation and explicitly by describing his work as a first attempt that requires further study and refinement. He is aware that deception campaigns, selective visibility, and retrospective narrative construction can distort interpretation. Yet his method remains robust because it is grounded in multi-source verification, historical precedent, and operational knowledge.

Maloney’s interpretive framework resonates strongly with Clausewitz’s theory that war is a contest of wills conducted on both the physical and moral planes. Clausewitz held that moral forces often have greater influence on war than physical ones. Maloney demonstrates that the nuclear information age has magnified the moral plane to the point where physical actions have become absorbed into it. In this environment military movements are understood as messages. The meaning of a bomber flight with its transponder switched on, or of a mobile missile launcher deploying to a dispersal site, or of a SSBN appearing in an unexpected region, lies in the psychological effect it creates rather than in any immediate tactical purpose.

Canadian experience in peace support operations provides a practical analogy. During operations in Bosnia, a single APC was often more significant as a signal than as a weapon. Its posture, location, and movement conveyed rules, boundaries, and consequences to belligerent actors. Physical capability served a psychological function. Maloney suggests that nuclear forces today operate according to the same logic. They function as instruments of meaning, shaping adversary perceptions of risk, resolve, vulnerability, and potential escalation.

This connects directly to Maloney’s use of the Russian concept of combat potential. Combat potential refers to the psychological and political meaning of military capability rather than to quantitative measures alone. When the United States deliberately revealed the presence of a SSBN in the Arabian Sea, it was signalling that the vessel could hold Russia’s ICBM fields at risk from an unexpected vector. The revelation of location was itself the message. In the Cool War, potential is interpreted through the information environment, and meaning arises from visibility and angle of approach as much as from raw destructive power.

Taken together, these elements show that the Cool War is not a reversion to the Cold War. It represents a new strategic condition in which signalling is constant, visibility is pervasive, and interpretation is global. Both adversaries and allies operate within this environment, and both shape and are shaped by its dynamics. The Cold War’s tightly controlled channels and rare signalling events have been replaced by an ecosystem in which every movement can be observed, analyzed, debated, reaffirmed, or misinterpreted within minutes. The result is a deterrence environment that is simultaneously more complex and more psychologically charged yet still constrained by the existential risks of nuclear escalation.

Maloney’s conclusions are cautious but clear. Nuclear weapons continue to impose the ultimate limit on escalation. Fear of uncontrolled nuclear conflict restrains state action even in moments of extreme tension. At the same time, the constant presence of nuclear capabilities within the information environment intensifies psychological pressure and magnifies the role of perception. The Cool War therefore demands new analytical tools, new professional habits of mind, and new doctrines for managing escalation in a world where signals circulate freely and interpretation has become a collective activity.

The Cool War is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand contemporary strategic competition. It provides a compelling conceptual framework for the nuclear information age, a clear methodological path for future research, and a detailed reconstruction of the most significant nuclear signalling crisis of the twenty first century. Maloney has provided the field with a foundation. It is now the responsibility of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to develop it further.