Comment Re:not totally irrational (Score 1) 150
You could even get the drawn-out nuclear war by accident.
Assume there's some fraction of the nuclear arsenal held back from the initial exchange as a strategic reserve. Then the sky falls on Washington (or Moscow, or Beijing, or whatever) and command and control over those forces completely disintegrates. Now you've got widely dispersed units with no clear orders having to decide for themselves if being unable to raise command on the radio means they should let their birds fly or not. Some of those units are going to be really out of touch -- missile submarines, say, ordered at the outbreak of war to find a quiet spot at the bottom of the Pacific and sit there silently for a couple of weeks before coming up for new orders -- so you could imagine periodic ragged exchanges breaking out for weeks or months after the war is actually over, as those captains come up and discover that there's nobody around to give them those new orders. Some of them may take that as a signal to launch on their own initiative; others may be under explicit "dead hand" orders to launch unless they are given an affirmative order not to.
The novel Warday , about the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange between the US and USSR in the mid-'80s, had an interesting chapter along these lines: an "interview" with a Royal Navy destroyer captain tasked in the postwar world with running down remaining Soviet missile submarines and trying to explain to them that the Soviet Union had collapsed and their mission was over. (And with sinking them if they refused to believe it.)