About the Event: In an international security environment marked by the heightened risk of nuclear weapons use and the weakening of the global nuclear order, reviving arms control between the two largest nuclear weapon States—the United States and Russia—is imperative. But under what circumstances might they return to the negotiating table? One school of thought holds that it may take another event like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to (re)awaken American and Russian leaders to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the need for greater restraint. Yet this claim, and the interpretation of Cold War history on which it rests, have not been subject to rigorous analysis in existing work. Using insights from cognitive psychology on the phenomenon of “wakeup calls,” I fill this gap by testing prevailing assumptions about the role of nuclear crises in driving arms control and assessing what the results mean for theory and practice. I show that these assumptions are not supported empirically and argue that future nuclear crises could have adverse effects on arms control depending on the priors of the leaders in office. These results challenge normative claims promoted in the scholarship on nuclear learning about the kinds of lessons nuclear crises teach and the influence of these events on elite inferential learning. In so doing, they demonstrate why electing leaders into office who have already learned the value of arms control is more likely to precipitate a return to the negotiating table than relying on external events to teach them.

About the Speaker: Sarah Bidgood is a postdoctoral fellow in technology and international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), based in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on nuclear diplomacy and military innovation in the United States, Russian Federation, and beyond. From 2023-2024, Sarah was a Stanton nuclear security fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program. Prior to this, she served as director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, where she remains a non-resident scholar. Sarah’s work has been published as single and co-authored articles in journals such as International Security, Cold War History, and The Nonproliferation Review, as well as outlets including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Arms Control Today, and War on the Rocks. She is a coauthor of Death Dust: The Rise, Decline, and Future of Radiological Weapons Programs, which was published by Stanford University Press in December 2023. Sarah received her PhD in Defence Studies from King's College London and holds an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in Russian.

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