Kaur:

HT; your link to Morgan, Dancing with the Bear: Managing Escalation in a Conflict with Russia (IFRI Proliferation Papers, No. 40, Winter 2012), is interesting theory. Of course, in the area of nuclear escalation and deterrence, everything is theory because the only practitioner has been the US (a point made more than once by the Soviets during the Cold War) - and, in 1945, Japan was not in a position to escalate !

Morgan (from RAND) sums himself:

"Escalation", the tendency of belligerents to increase the force or breadth of their attacks to gain advantage or avoid defeat, is not a new phenomenon. Systematic thought about how to manage it, however, did not crystallize until the Cold War and the invention of nuclear weapons. Given the limitations identified in these Cold War approaches to escalation and the profound changes that have affected the strategic environment, a new framework for thinking and managing escalation against nuclear adversaries is needed. It should lead to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of escalation: its dynamics, forms, and the motives that drive it.

This paper attempts to fill a gap in the current strategic literature, and explores the challenges that NATO would face in managing escalation in a military conflict with a major nuclear power such as the Russian Federation. Escalation management is about keeping wars limited. In a war against Russia, Western leaders would need to weigh their interests in the issue at stake and adjust their war aims and efforts accordingly. They could secure success only if it is defined and pursued in ways that ultimately allow for compromise and do not threaten the survival of the Russian state or its leaders.
Morgan et al did a RAND study, Dangerous Thresholds - Managing Escalation in the 21st Century (2008):

Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition. When such competition entails military confrontation or war, the pressure to escalate can become intense due to the potential cost of losing contests of deadly force. Cold War–era thinking about escalation focused on the dynamics of bipolar, superpower confrontation and strategies to control it. Today's security environment, however, demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats involving not only long-standing nuclear powers, but also new, lesser nuclear powers and irregular adversaries, such as insurgent groups and terrorists.

This examination of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on historical examples from World War I to the struggle against global Jihad. It reveals that, to manage the risks of escalatory chain reactions in future conflicts, military and political leaders will need to understand and dampen the mechanisms of deliberate, accidental, and inadvertent escalation.

Informing the analysis are the results of two modified Delphi exercises, which focused on a potential conflict between China and the United States over Taiwan and a potential conflict between states and non-state actors in the event of a collapse of Pakistan's government.
Along the way, Morgan has also considered the "escalation ladder" in hypothetical conflicts with Iran and North Korea. See "Conclusion" to 2012 monograph (pp. 47-50 pdf), bringing all together:

All of this suggests that effective threshold management will be crucially important in an armed conflict with any of the aforementioned states. Western leaders will need to assess the balance of interests and identify each side’s critical thresholds. They will need to illuminate these thresholds to opponents in ways that deter deliberate escalation and reduce the risks of inadvertent escalation. They will need to manage their forces firmly to avoid escalatory accidents, and they will need to calmly evaluate and respond to the accidents that will inevitably occur over the course of the war. Most of all, they will need to restrain their objectives and settle for limited gains, which will most likely amount to defeating the opponent’s aggression in ways that simply preserve the status quo.

Thankfully, the world has never witnessed a major conventional war between nuclear-armed adversaries, much less one in which nuclear weapons were exchanged. Studies late in the Cold War raised serious doubts whether the latter could be kept limited, or even prosecuted in a coherent manner, given the massive disruptions in communications and physical, mental, and emotional dislocations that would occur at multiple levels of command once nuclear weapons began detonating on each side. Although a handful of analysts continued to lobby for counterforce, nuclear war-fighting strategies to the very end of the era, the ranks of those who accepted Kahn’s thesis that nuclear wars could be fought and won had by then grown exceedingly thin in the West and were substantially diminished in the East. The near consensus was that any nuclear war would likely be uncontrollable, resulting in consequences so tragic that victory, however defined, would be pyrrhic.

The implication of such a conclusion is that for any escalation management framework to be viable, it must inform strategy making while the conflict is well below the nuclear threshold. Further, it must face up to the uncertainties inherent in war – the lack of perfect information and perfect control; the subjectivity of perception; the inevitable miscalculations that result from incompetence, fear, and fatigue; and the general unpredictability of human behavior – and offer realistic approaches for managing these factors to the extent they are manageable. Cold War-era approaches to escalation management failed to meet those criteria. As a result, decision makers on both sides of the East-West divide abandoned them and relied instead on conflict avoidance.
- to be cont. -