Deterrence
Understanding Schelling’s Nuclear Paradigms with Francis J. Gavin
Francis J. Gavin explains why Thomas Schelling remains foundational to nuclear strategy despite being an economist, and argues that “strategic stability” is often invoked without clear definition. He highlights tensions between mutual vulnerability and US…
Strategic Stability in a Rapidly Changing World
Harold Trinkunas previews our special issue on strategic stability by explaining how Cold War deterrence assumptions rooted in a bilateral US–Soviet relationship no longer hold amid more nuclear-armed actors, wider access to AI, cyber, hypersonics, and the…
The (Elusive) Search for Strategic Stability
The combination of technological and geopolitical change puts pressure on the search for strategic stability in the contemporary international environment.
Ensuring US Military Readiness in the Indo-Pacific
Eyck Freymann and Harry Halem argue that the United States can sustain conventional deterrence against China into the 2030s through targeted investments in logistics and the industrial base. They join our editors to discuss why a holistic view of the military…
Conventional Options Theory in the New Nuclear Era
Tyler Bowen from the US Naval War College joins us to discuss the logic of conventional coercion in nuclear crises. As the US faces nuclear-armed adversaries like Russia and China, understanding how to "thread the needle" between defense and escalation is…
The Arsenal of Democracy: Keeping China Deterred in an Age of Hard Choices
The margin of deterrence against China is rapidly shrinking, driven not by a failure of US technological innovation, but by the American and allied defense industrial base’s inability to field and sustain cutting-edge capabilities at scale, at speed, and…
Threading the Needle: The Logic of Conventional Coercion in Nuclear Crises
Can conventional military success lead to coercive success in a nuclear crisis? Some scholars argue that achieving limited conventional success can be used to coerce nuclear adversaries. Others argue that conventional capabilities coerce by manipulating…
Legal Deterrence by Denial: Strategic Initiative and International Law in the Gray Zone
International security competition in the twenty-first century is likely to remain largely within the “gray zone”—a category of aggressive activities that threaten core aspects of statehood while avoiding the threshold of armed force that has…
Lost Seoul? Assessing Pyongyang’s Other Deterrent
For decades the North Korean military has fallen ever further behind its South Korean and US rivals. Unable to compete symmetrically on the battlefield, Pyongyang has enhanced its military’s ability to coerce the South. In addition to its nuclear program,…
Negotiating Primacy: Strategic Stability, Superpower Arms Control, and the End of the Cold War
The United States successfully used the concept of strategic stability to tip the nuclear balance against the Soviet Union during the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) of the 1980s and early 1990s. Both superpowers sought to employ strategic stability to…
Just Like Yesterday? New Critiques of the Nuclear Revolution
Four recent books offer compelling political and strategic explanations for why states pursue expansive nuclear and foreign policies. They provide new insights on an enduring question: What are the implications of nuclear weapons for international competition…
The Role of U.S. Diplomacy in Countering Russia’s Nuclear Threats and Misbehavior
With the ongoing war in Ukraine and the recent suspension of the New START treaty, concerns about nuclear escalation have been on the rise. Rose Gottemoeller argues that, because of the existential threat that nuclear weapons pose, the United States has a…