The analogy is a broad one: a stressed human operator thinks they are under attack; they have a tiny amount of unreliable information, and a short time window to make decisions; they have an opportunity to counter-attack, but a false negative means the opportunity is irreversibly lost (because the adversary's aircraft attacked their aircraft on the ground / because the adversary's ICBM destroyed their ICBM on the ground).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
Any accident that looks anomalous, a single ICBM or SLBM, isn't likely to provoke an actual war with reasonable actors. The other side's just likely to then use the threat of war to extract truly painful concessions.
The "reasonable" thing still leaves out Russia, I suppose. But I have serious doubts they could even manage a nuclear strike at this point. How many missiles would make it out of the silos, how many bombs would detonate? The outskirts of Las Vegas have suffered worse than they could manage.
Russia still acts rationally, but with poor assumptions (see Ukraine). If they were to actually launch a nuke at the West, for any reason, they would have to weight almost certain annihilation. One side of MAD still holds.
The threat I'm talking about is human error in command & control that causes the legitimate launch of a large number of ICBM's at once.
They've kept strategic ambiguity, but it's obvious that the US has developed a plan (or several plans) on how to react if Russia drops a nuke on Ukraine. And it seems clear that the US feels they can make Putin and Russia regret the use of nukes without using American nukes in response.
I wonder how many of those accidents are actually accidents.