Nuclear Strategy
Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Weapons: A Commonsense Approach to Understanding Costs and Benefits
Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning (ML), has transformed computing, offering potential benefits in the nuclear enterprise, which encompasses weapons, delivery systems, platforms, and command and control infrastructure. While AI can…
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…
Escalation Management in Ukraine: “Learning by Doing” in Response to the “Threat that Leaves Something to Chance”
The article analyses a process of escalation management over time between nuclear states under conditions of radical uncertainty. After Russia invaded Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin manipulated uncertainty to manage escalation and to deter NATO support of…
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 Standstill Conundrum: The Advent of Second-Strike Vulnerability and Options to Address It
Emerging and disruptive technologies spell an uncertain future for second-strike retaliatory forces. New sensors and big data analysis may render mobile missiles and submarines vulnerable to detection. I call this development the “standstill conundrum”:…
Nuclear Operations and Counter-Homeland Conventional Warfare: Navigating Between Nuclear Restraint and Escalation Risk
Bruce Sugden explores the dynamics that could lead the nuclear great powers to conduct counter-homeland conventional strikes, risking nuclear escalation. He explores how competitors view one another's conventional-nuclear firebreaks and their nuclear…
Wormhole Escalation in the New Nuclear Age
Increasingly capable and intrusive digital information technologies, advanced dual-use military capabilities, and diffused global power structures will reshape future crises and conflicts between nuclear-armed adversaries and challenge traditional ways of…
Contrasting Views on How to Code a Nuclear Crisis
In this issue’s correspondence section, Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long offer up an alternative way to code nuclear crises in response to Mark S. Bell and Julia Macdonald's article in the February 2019 issue of TNSR. Bell and Macdonald, in turn,…
A Primer on Analyzing Nuclear Competitions
Bruce Sugden offers a nuclear primer for analysts studying nuclear competition, urging them to broaden the range of plausible “what if” questions around which their studies are structured.
How to Think About Nuclear Crises
How dangerous are nuclear crises? What dynamics underpin how they unfold? Recent tensions between North Korea and the United States have exposed disagreement among scholars and analysts regarding these questions. We reconcile these apparently contradictory…
Rethinking the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy
Nuclear weapons have long played a central but often unappreciated role in American grand strategy. In spite of the unimaginable consequences of their use in war, we know far less about how the bomb shapes U.S. national security and world politics than we…
Marching Toward a U.S.-North Korea Summit: The Historical Case for Optimism, Pessimism, and Caution
The history of denuclearization efforts on the Korean peninsula gives reason for pessimism, caution, and optimism. Attempting to critically engage that history can help the United States narrow uncertainty, prepare for a long diplomatic process should one…