Abstract: Deterrence is one of the most central concepts in international relations scholarship. Countries can dissuade changes to the status quo, according to the logic of deterrence, by threatening an opponent with pain (deterrence by punishment) or by reducing the probability that an opponent will achieve its aims (deterrence by denial). In the realm of international security, most deterrence theorists assume that states need military capabilities to deter by punishment or denial. Deterrence works, based on this line of thinking, because states can use military power to destroy cities, bomb critical military targets, or blunt land invasions. It is also possible, however, to punish an adversary without invoking destruction militarily. Yet deterrence through non-military means remains poorly understood in international relations. This project develops a theory to identify the conditions under which countries can deter opponents without using threats of military force. I explore the implications of this theory in one particular context: the development of dual-use nuclear technology. Having the capability to build nuclear weapons — a condition known as “nuclear latency” — may provide countries with deterrence benefits that we normally associate with having a nuclear arsenal. When states achieve nuclear latency, they (implicitly) threaten to develop nuclear weapons at some point in the future. The threat here is to pursue a policy that others would find undesirable, not to physically destroy things of value on another state’s territory, as in traditional deterrence theory. Does this kind of threat discourage others from meddling in a country’s affairs? This study presents the results of an analysis designed to identify the effects of nuclear latency (and nuclear arsenals) on the onset of international conflict from 1945 to 2000, drawing on a new dataset of sensitive dual-use nuclear plants in 32 countries.

About the Speaker: Matthew Fuhrmann is an associate professor of political science and Ray A. Rothrock `77 Fellow at Texas A&M University. He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2016 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He is the author of Atomic Assistance: How “Atoms for Peace” Programs Cause Nuclear Insecurity (Cornell University Press, 2012) and the coauthor of Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His work has been published or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals such as American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and Journal of Politics. He has also written opinion pieces for The Atlantic (online), The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, and USA Today. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. You can follow him on Twitter @mcfuhrmann.

Abstract: On 13 February 2016, in a widely-reported interview for the BBC, Ashton Carter, the US Secretary of Defense, made clear that the US Government supported the maintenance and renewal of Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent force of Trident submarines.  According to Carter, Trident enabled Britain to ‘continue to play that outsized role on the world stage that it does because of its moral standing and its historical standing.’  However, during the early 1960s, attitudes in Washington to the UK’s independent nuclear capabilities were altogether different.  This paper will begin with a re-examination of Robert McNamara’s famous address at Ann Arbor in June 1962 when he openly criticised the existence of independent allied nuclear forces.  Using new evidence, it will chart the background to the speech, the reception it was accorded, and how it helped to intensify tensions in Anglo-American relations when the Skybolt missile system was cancelled by the US at the end of the same year.  The paper will also show how by the end of the Johnson administration, and the tenure of McNamara’s period as Secretary of Defense, the US had become reconciled to the continued existence of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and even begun to take steps to assist with its improvement.  

About the Speaker: Matthew Jones is Professor of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science. After receiving his DPhil from St Antony's College, Oxford, he was appointed to a Lectureship in the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London in 1994, and subsequently promoted to Reader in International History before moving to the University of Nottingham in 2004, and then to the LSE in 2013.  His interests span post-war British and US foreign policy, nuclear history, and the histories of empire and decolonization in South East Asia.  His books include Britain, the United States and the Mediterranean War, 1942-44 (Macmillan, 1996), Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia, and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and After Hiroshima: The United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945-1965, (CUP, 2010).   In 2008, Jones was commissioned by the Cabinet Office to write a two-volume official history of the UK strategic nuclear deterrent, covering the period between 1945 and 1982, the first volume of which has now been completed.   

Abstract: The 1995 launch of a sounding rocket from Andoya in Norway allegedly misinterpreted as an attack in Russia and the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 1962 have one thing in common: they have both been referred to as "the closest we came to nuclear war." The 1962 crisis has mostly been studied from an American perspective due to the availability of documentary evidence and of the Kennedy tapes, until the 1990s when Cuba and the Soviet Union were given a voice, with the rest of the world still largely absent from the understanding of the event. The 1995 close call has been controversial and is remembered in conflicting ways: an alarmist and an untroubled one.

About the Speaker: Benoît Pelopidas is a CISAC affiliate and lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. He was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC for the 2011-2012 academic year.

He received his Ph. D. in political science from Sciences Po (Paris) and the University of Geneva in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in 2010-2011. Since 2005, he has been teaching international relations at Sciences Po (Paris), the University of Geneva and the Monterey Institute of International Studies (Graduate School of International Policy and Management).

In 2010, he won the "outstanding student essay prize" from the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Essay Competition and in 2011, he was awarded the "Best Graduate Paper 2010" from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. Also in 2011, he won the SNIS Award 2010 for the Best Thesis in International Studies from the Swiss Network for International Studies. A book based on his dissertation is forthcoming in French by Sciences Po University Press.

He published When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the US and Russia (with Didier Chaudet and Florent Parmentier; Ashgate, 2009) as well as articles in The Nonproliferation Review, the European Journal of Social Sciences, the Swiss Political Science Review, and the French Yearbook of International Relations. His research focuses on epistemic communities in international security, renunciation of nuclear weapons as a historical possibility, the uses of nuclear history and memory and French nuclear policies.

Abstract: The nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran moved the International Atomic Energy Agency to the center of public attention. Based on multi-archival research and oral history interviews, this talk will look into the early history of the IAEA’s nuclear inspectorate. The foundations of today’s safeguards system were laid in the mid-1950s, when a group of twelve nations negotiated the Statute of the IAEA. In the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union abandoned its formerly critical stance on nuclear safeguards. Following the entry-into-force of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) comprehensive safeguards were introduced. The control of diversion was at the heart of the IAEA’s early safeguards system, while it neglected other aspects of the proliferation problem, such as the distribution of dual-use technology and related knowledge, or the development of clandestine nuclear programs. It was not lack of knowledge or imagination, but the complex technical, political, and legal background that was the reason for this limitation.

About the Speaker: Elisabeth Roehrlich is a senior researcher and project director at the University of Vienna’s Department of Contemporary History, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. She received her PhD. in History from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and held fellowships at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., and Monash South Africa. Her research focuses on the history of international relations and the evolution of the global nuclear order. She is the author of a prize-winning book about the former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky (Kreisky’s Außenpolitik, Vienna University Press, 2009), and her work on the IAEA has been published or is forthcoming in journals such the IAEA Bulletin and the Journal of Cold War Studies. Roehrlich has been awarded funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and the Austrian Central Bank to support her research on the IAEA.