Nuclear Strategy
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…
North Korea Defied the Theoretical Odds: What Can We Learn from its Successful Nuclearization?
How well do the existing theories about nuclear proliferation predict North Korea's successful nuclearization?