Roundtables

The digital transformation of nuclear forces made modern nuclear forces more effective but potentially introduced strategic cyber vulnerabilities. Despite warnings about the cyber threats to nuclear stability, our understandings of when and why cyber operations create nuclear instability are rife with contradictory suppositions. Does entanglement create interdependence that stabilizes crisis dyads, or destabilizing pathways to inadvertent nuclear war? Do uncertainties about cyber vulnerabilities within nuclear command, control, and communications lead to a security dilemma that incentivizes preemptive nuclear use? Or does the uncertainty about how cyber operations create effects and vulnerabilities create incentives for restraint? This paper argues that current literature overlooks a foundational element of cyber and strategic stability: how the structure of networks determines the feasibility and effectiveness of cyber operations. By shifting the focus toward the intersection of network architecture and nuclear use, this piece argues that highly centralized information-processing or command nodes, which increase a network’s efficiency, can create incentives for deliberate nuclear escalation. Second, entanglement and network complexity increase the potential for inadvertent escalation or accidental nuclear use. Third, cyberattacks that exploit trust in data to degrade decision-making are the most dangerous for escalation risk.

Many of the leaders of new nuclear powers sit atop regimes that are personalistic in nature, and thus less constrained by institutions or public opinion than more democratic regimes. Such authoritarian leaders have more freedom to allow their psychological proclivities to influence their decisions and behavior. These tendencies include four psychological biases that influence decision-making: overconfidence, the planning fallacy, the illusion of validity, and the prominence effect. The ubiquity of these biases challenges our existing assumptions about rationality and the nature of strategic stability. The introduction of new and potentially more dangerous weapons—including the use of artificial intelligence or hypersonic missiles—heightens the risk of misperception, miscalculation, increased time pressure, and other factors exacerbating the threats confronting the world’s nuclear powers. Lessons from both cognitive and evolutionary psychology are discussed, as well as some policy recommendations to help improve decision-making under conditions of dominant leadership styles.

How will advances in artificial intelligence impact strategic stability? A growing number of studies and reports assessing the ways that advances in AI could influence global politics focus on the potential risks to strategic stability from integration of AI into the nuclear domain, particularly in large language models and frontier AI. These risks come from multiple potential sources, including miscalculation by machines, sidestepping of human firebreaks to escalation, AI-induced accidents, the speed of AI-enabled warfare, and other mechanisms. The relationship between AI integration and strategic stability may change over time as knowledge and experience with AI systems increases, thus decreasing the likelihood of automation bias, but fundamentally the relationship will depend on second-strike capabilities. While there is inherent uncertainty since we are still early in the age of AI, at this point it appears as though the higher the confidence nuclear-armed states have in their second-strike capabilities, the lower the probability that they integrate AI in dangerous ways that make escalation at machine speed more likely, and vice versa.

Emerging technologies possess the potential to transform military competition and the international system in an uncertain, potentially destabilizing fashion. Are there ways to capture the benefits of these new technologies without unleashing catastrophic dangers? What insights and lessons can we glean from history—particularly from the Cold War experience the United States had with nuclear weapons—to help us navigate the challenges of today and tomorrow’s new technologies? This essay examines the concept of strategic stability, and in particular, the important ideas from the foundational thinker of the nuclear age, Thomas Schelling. For decades, strategic stability has been offered as both the prized goal and the great accomplishment of America’s nuclear statecraft, with Schelling acknowledged as the idea’s father. Examined closely, however, questions, tensions, and even contradictions appear, both in Schelling’s work and in the use of strategic stability to describe America’s nuclear strategy and statecraft.

Emerging technologies developed since the end of the Cold War—and their proliferation to new actors—call into question the prospects for strategic stability in the twenty-first century. Strategic stability exists when rivals are mutually deterred and lack any rational incentive to escalate to nuclear use during conflict. Yet, as this issue’s Roundtable examines, emerging technologies—with their new knowledge and tools with the potential for enhancing military capabilities—are impacting stability in such ways that the assumptions of rationality and deterrence no longer hold. First, these emerging technologies may be able to achieve effects once reserved to nuclear weapons, creating incentives for preemption. Second, these technologies are proliferating horizontally across more states, complicating mutual deterrence. Third, such technologies affect the psychology of decision-makers during crises, undermining rationality. Just as these phenomena may undermine stability, however, adversaries may yet be able to use the very same technologies to restore the strategic balance, although how is not yet fully apparent.

Mara Karlin and Mathew Burrows review “The Insiders’ Game,” a book exploring how democratic elites—including legislators, military leaders, and civilian officials—constrain presidential decision-making in war.

The global nuclear order is undergoing rapid and complex transformations, driven by the expansion of arsenals, evolving doctrines, and the interplay of domestic and international politics. This roundtable brings together seven incisive essays that explore the shifting dynamics of nuclear security across six key regions—Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, China, and the Korean Peninsula. From the cascading effects of U.S.-China competition to the domestic political drivers of nuclear policy in both democratic and authoritarian states, the contributors analyze how these forces are reshaping deterrence, alliances, and proliferation risks.

In this roundtable review of “War, States, and International Order: Alberico Gentili and the Foundational Myth of the Laws of War,” the contributors engage with Vergerio’s analysis of canon-making by suggesting ways to broaden its historical scope and highlighting what limits interdisciplinary dialogue.

In this roundtable review, Mark Pomar, Kathryn Stoner, Carol Saivetz, Natasha Kuhrt, and Onur İşçi offer their thoughts on Sergey Radchenko’s new book, “To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.” These contributors offer a diverse range of perspectives on Soviet foreign policy — and implications for Russian policy today. Plus, Radchenko offers a response.