Nuclear Forces, Strategy, and Deterrence

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What considerations do states navigate when building and diversifying their nuclear forces? How does the structure of a state’s nuclear forces affect deterrence? And how do these conceptions of deterrence affect cyber capabilities and our strategic thinking about them? This panel offers new empirical evidence and theoretical insights to update our understanding of how nuclear forces are structured, how that impacts deterrence, and what power these ideas about deterrence and strategy have in the new technological realm of cyber capabilities. Debak Das examines how regional nuclear powers build their nuclear forces and uses newly declassified archival documents to trace the role of foreign assistance in the acquisition of nuclear delivery systems. David Arceneaux and Kyungwon Suh ask the question, why do states diversify their nuclear delivery platforms at widely different speeds? They build an original dataset that measures the deployment of seven unique nuclear delivery platforms to explain variation in the diversification of nuclear delivery systems. Gartzke, Kaplow, and Mehta consider deterrence and the structure of nuclear forces and find that increasing the number of warheads per delivery platform augments the offensive capability of a state but does not improve deterrence. Using data on nuclear force structures and conventional disputes between nuclear states, they suggest several ways to improve future nuclear stability. Finally, Jennifer Spindel investigates the ways in which cyber capabilities can intersect with nuclear technologies to create entanglements and complications for alliances and deterrence relationships. Taken together, the papers in this panel use diverse theoretical and methodological lenses to add to the existing discourse on nuclear force development, deterrence, and the value of these concepts in new contexts like cyber strategy.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security

Individual Presentations

• Delivering the Bomb: Foreign Assistance in the Development of Nuclear Forces - Debak Das, Stanford University

• The Sources of Nuclear Platform Diversification - Giles David Arceneaux, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Kyungwon Suh, Syracuse University

• Deterrence and the Structure of Nuclear Forces - Erik Gartzke, UCSD; Rupal Mehta, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Chair

• Vipin Narang Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Discussant

• J Andres Gannon University of California, San Diego