About the event: How AI might be used in nuclear command and control is the subject of much discussion in national security circles.  But this debate—important though it has been—obscures many other ways that AI could be used or should not be used across the entire nuclear weapons enterprise.  (In this talk, the nuclear weapons enterprise also encompasses nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, the associated command and control and the links of these entities to AI in systems not usually associated with nuclear weapons.)  Key attributes of AI and the nuclear weapons enterprise will be reviewed, principles for thinking about AI in the nuclear weapons enterprise discussed, and specific guidelines for assessing the wisdom of AI in any given nuclear application proposed.

About the speaker: Herbert Lin is senior research scholar and Hank J. Holland Fellow at Stanford University whose research interests are at the intersection of national security and emerging technologies. He is Chief Scientist Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies and serves on the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Lin was a member of President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity (2016) and the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder (2020).  He was also a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee, where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

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No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: We use survey experiments to explore a variety of different contexts and how they affect the choices a decision maker might have to make about using nuclear weapons. One set of surveys explores the relationship between expected casualties and the willingness to use nuclear weapons. The result is clearly increasing support for nuclear use as expected casualties in a difficult conventional war increase. We also explore how the alternatives given to a decision maker influence choice. More specifically, we show that when the option not to launch nuclear weapons is presented along with three options to use those weapons, more people select not to launch. Overall, we also find clear evidence of consistent differences between democrats and republicans as well as a strong relationship between decision makers’ punitive tendencies and their support for using nuclear weapons. Implications for risk management and policy will be discussed.

About the speakers:

Rose McDermott:
Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She directs the Watson Postdoctoral Program. She works in the area of political psychology. She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has also taught at Cornell and UCSB. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences twice. She is the author of six books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over two hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as American foreign and defense policy, experimentation, national security intelligence, gender, social identity, cybersecurity, emotion and decision-making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.

Paul Slovic:
Paul Slovic is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a founder and President of Decision Research. After 47 years, he has rejoined the Oregon Research Institute as a senior scientist. He holds a B.A. from Stanford University (1959) and an M.A (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Michigan. He studies human judgment, decision making, and the psychology of risk. With colleagues worldwide, he has developed methods to describe risk perceptions and measure their impacts on individuals and society. His recent work examines "psychic numbing" and the failure to respond to mass human tragedies. He is a past President of the Society for Risk Analysis and in 1991 received its Distinguished Contribution Award. In 1993 he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. In 2022, Dr. Slovic received the Franklin Institute’s Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in the Science of Decision Making.

Sharon Weiner:
Sharon K. Weiner is an Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University as well as a Visiting Researcher for the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. Sharon's research, teaching, and policy engagement are at the intersection of organizational politics and U.S. national security. Her current work focuses on the theory, practice, and social construction of deterrence, the politics of U.S. nuclear weapon modernization programs, and larger issues of civil-military relations. Her most recent book, Managing the Military: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Civil-Military Relations (Columbia University Press, 2022) analyzes the power of the JCS chairman to help or hinder the president's ability to implement their defense policy preferences.  She also collaborates with Moritz Kutt (Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg) on The Nuclear Biscuit (thenuclearbiscuit.org), a virtual reality experience involving a nuclear crisis. The project analyses how people make high stakes national security decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

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About the event: Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has cast a spotlight on Russia’s burgeoning partnership with Iran. Moscow looked to Tehran for drones and ammunition to fuel its so-called ‘special military operation’, and Iran’s support for Russia’s war reflected a decade-long strengthening of Russo-Iranian ties, beginning with the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.

Despite a relationship historically marred by mistrust and unmet expectations, the two regimes have worked together to promote their common interests in Syria, where battlefield coordination soon developed into much deeper political alignment. Nicole Grajewski uncovers the drivers of ever-closer cooperation between the Kremlin and the Islamic Republic. Detailing the internal structures, shared anxieties and broader ambitions underpinning this alignment, she explores the genesis of Russia and Iran’s mutual antagonism towards the Western-led global order; the impact of deep-seated leadership concerns over regime security and domestic protests; and the future trajectory of the partnership within the larger world order.

About the speaker: Nicole Grajewski is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Oxford and is the author of Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance from Syria to Ukraine.

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No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: When states go to war, they must devise a strategy that anticipates how their use of military force will achieve national objectives. But that choice is heavily constrained. This book project shows how wartime strategy is a function of both dispositional and situational factors - that is, the military’s abiding organizational preferences, and the government’s contingency-specific decisions, respectively. This presentation focuses on one of the book’s key theoretical contributions: how a military’s structure and processes reveal its unwritten warfighting preferences. In the Indian case, official doctrine pronouncements suggest a military that is postured to fight state of the art maneuver warfare. But, in reality, its entrenched preferences have not changed in over half a century, and heavily favor attritional combat. Doctrine, of course, is not destiny - states like India can and have fought differently under certain extraordinary conditions. But absent those rare conditions, the Indian Army’s attritional preferences dominate the state’s strategic options, which has implications for conventional deterrence and strategic stability.

About the speaker: Arzan Tarapore is a Research Scholar whose research focuses on Indian military strategy and regional security issues in the Indo-Pacific. In academic year 2024-25, he is also a part-time Visiting Research Professor at the China Landpower Studies Center, at the U.S. Army War College. Prior to his scholarly career, he served for 13 years in the Australian Defence Department in various analytic, management, and liaison positions, including operational deployments and a diplomatic posting to the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC.

His academic work has been published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, International Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, Asia Policy, and Joint Force Quarterly, among others, and his policy commentary frequently appears on platforms such as Foreign Affairs, the Hindu, the Indian Express, The National Interest, the Lowy Institute's Interpreter, the Brookings Institution’s Lawfare, and War on the Rocks.

He previously held research and teaching positions at Georgetown University, the East-West Center in Washington, the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, and the RAND Corporation.

He earned a PhD in war studies from King's College London, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA (Hons) from the University of New South Wales. Follow his commentary on Twitter @arzandc and his website at arzantarapore.com.

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About the event: Why do some leaders reposition themselves on salient foreign policy issues in ways that may contradict their earlier behavior or rhetoric? I argue that expectations of how leaders ought to behave are tied to their reputations; however, leaders are also both strategic actors and reputationally mindful. In other words, leaders have strategic incentives to either maintain or moderate their reputations on salient foreign policy issues – a phenomenon I term reputation management. Using controlled case comparisons of eight cases of foreign policy position-taking across India, Israel, South Korea and the United States, I argue that two variables -- the salience of a moderation imperative, and the degree of electoral constraint circumscribing leader behavior -- determine the opportunity costs for leaders to either maintain or moderate their reputations, which outwardly manifests as behavioral consistency or inconsistency respectively.

About the speaker: Fahd Humayun is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He completed his PhD in Political Science from Yale University in 2022 before joining Tufts University as an Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research looks at the domestic sources of interstate conflict and crisis behavior, expanding on existing theories of democratic accountability and political representation as they pertain to domestic decision-making and crisis signaling. His book project, “Leaders, Reputation & War” uses case studies of foreign policy position-taking India, Israel, South Korea and the United States to explain why domestic politics compels some leaders to commit to unanticipated national security pathways. He also holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in International History from the London School of Economics.

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About the event: In nearly every country with sizable armed forces, debates persist about the relative effectiveness of military recruitment systems. Conventional wisdom asserts that volunteer armies fight more effectively in battle than conscript armies due to higher levels of training and motivation. I argue instead that conscript forces outperform their volunteer counterparts for several reasons. First, higher domestic political costs of sending draftees into combat incentivize leaders to vet military operations more carefully. Second, the leaders restrict conflicts to those that involve broadly recognized national interests, for which individual conscripts are highly motivated to bear real costs. Third, the average demographic makeup of conscript armies is superior to that of volunteer armies, which translates into advantages in battlefield skill acquisition. Democratic regime type and longer enlistment terms further bolster the battlefield effectiveness of conscript armies. I provide support for these propositions by analyzing cross-national battle-level data as well as American battlefield performance during the Vietnam War. My findings contribute to debates about military recruitment policy and civil–military relations.

About the speaker: Changwook Ju is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He specializes in International Relations and security studies, with a focus on military recruitment and effectiveness, China and global politics, and conflict-related sexual violence.

Changwook earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2024. Before Yale, he received an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy in 2018. In 2015, he graduated from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea, with dual undergraduate degrees in public policy and political science.

From 2011 to 2013, Changwook served in the Republic of Korea Marine Corps, attaining the rank of sergeant.

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About the event: Scholars have long debated why some conflicts spiral into prolonged cycles of hostility, while others fizzle out. Conventional wisdom suggests that states, when challenged, can demonstrate their resolve by retaliating militarily, thereby deterring future challenges. I argue that the desire for revenge, rather than deterrence concerns, shapes when individuals prefer military retaliation and why such actions provoke cyclical conflicts. Public support for military retaliation is primarily driven by a human desire to balance the suffering inflicted upon one's own ingroup, often without regard for the consequences. Consequently, instead of achieving deterrence, imposing costs on an adversary through military retaliation tends to provoke reciprocal retaliation. I test my theory using a preregistered survey experiment in which China attempts to deter U.S. intervention in a hypothetical Taiwan Strait crisis through retaliation. The results align with the logic of revenge. Rather than deterring the U.S., China's retaliation, which imposes greater suffering on the U.S., increases public support for further escalation, even in scenarios of secret U.S. retaliation with no deterrent benefit. This study contributes to the deterrence versus spiral model debate in two ways. First, it challenges the deterrence model, particularly theories of reputation for resolve. Second, it complements the spiral model by providing an alternative psychological microfoundation for the endogenous emergence of conflict spirals.

About the speaker: X Zhang is a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Zhang's research interests include the political psychology of interstate conflict, public opinion, and the domestic politics of foreign policy.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the event: Modern survey experiments indicate that in the event of a limited nuclear strike, the public in the targeted country, including a great democracy, would demand a decisive response. The implications for crisis stability are dire. Just at the moment when democratic decision makers would struggle to formulate a proportional response, they would also have to contend with an enraged populace shouting for vengeance. Public opinion as recently characterized is anathema to sound crisis management. The same mass sentiment that bolstered democratic resolve in the triumphal years after the Cold War now abandons presidents in the age of nuclear multipolarity to foredoomed strategies that overplay their hand. This, however, is not the whole story. Public opinion in real life also prevents leaders from throwing it all away or allowing crises to slip out of control. The Missiles of October in 1962 threatened international peace under different geopolitical circumstances, but the role of public opinion then has lessons for today. What might be called the Robert McNamara-Brent Scowcroft school still reigns. Rather than preclude crisis management, public opinion on net enables it: amplifying popular demand for peace and motivating extraordinary leader performance to preserve it.

About the speaker: Dr. Damon Coletta served as the endowed Scowcroft Professor of Political Science (2020-2021) at the United States Air Force Academy and director of the department’s Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies (2022-2023).  Damon edits the peer-reviewed e-journal, Space & Defense (2012-2024) and serves as social sciences liaison to USAFA’s nationally recognized Nuclear Weapons & Strategy minor program.  He completed a book on science & technology policy and international security, Courting Science: Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century (Stanford, 2016), and coedited NATO’s Return to Europe (Georgetown, 2017).

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About the event: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been invoked over one hundred times since its formal endorsement by the UN General Assembly in 2005. Although R2P was designed to protect populations around the world from mass atrocity, it is selectively applied to societies outside of the North. Cases of inaction are also observed over atrocities in the South that would otherwise qualify for intervention by UN standards. Why does the international community intervene in some cases and not others? I argue that R2P betrays a racialized bias whereby the legal principle of sovereignty is transformed into a conditional privilege withheld from most non-European countries all else equal. Debates over a peoples’ capacity for self-rule are historically framed or even justified by racism. Since R2P restores a similar debate wherein state sovereignty becomes contingent, it can affirm prevailing beliefs about race and capacity for self-governance as a means to political ends. I examine R2P cross-nationally by matching countries on characteristics that likely drive intervention. Using UN resolutions and original data on mass atrocity events, I measure the relationship between country racial majority and the decision to intervene. The results suggest that R2P is disproportionately invoked over societies racialized as non-white. To address variation in R2P invocation over countries in the South, I examine a set of cases qualitatively and show that inaction by the international community is racial as it is strategic. A theory of race deepens understanding of the contradictory values that cohere to shape international law and intervention. 

About the speaker: Bianca Freeman is a 2024-2026 UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD from UC San Diego Political Science in the summer of 2024. Bianca’s research focuses on the politics of race and racism in international law. In her dissertation and book project, she examines norms and agreements between states as legal outcomes of racial hierarchy in world politics. Bianca has published or has work forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science, Security Studies, International Studies Review, International Politics, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. 

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About the event: Questions about the likelihood of conflict between the United States and China have dominated international policy discussion for years. But the leading theory of power transitions between a declining hegemon and a rising rival is based exclusively on European examples, such as the Peloponnesian War, as well as the rise of Germany under Bismarck and the Anglo-German rivalry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What lessons does East Asian history offer, for both the power transitions debate and the future of U.S.-China relations?
Examining the rise and fall of East Asian powers over 1,500 years, we point out that East Asia historically has functioned very differently than did Europe; and even today the region has dynamics that are not leading to balancing or competitive behavior. In fact, the East Asian experience underscores domestic risks and constraints on great powers, not relative rise and decline in international competition. The threat of a US-China war from power transition is lower than often recognized, and the East Asian region is more stable than normally recognized.

About the speaker: Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods. Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

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