Other Nuclear Related Research

Nuclear Conviction argues that nuclear deterrence endures not because it is proven effective, but because it functions as a powerful belief system—cognitively reinforced by the human tendency to see absence of war as proof of deterrence, emotionally sustained by rituals of stoicism and control, and institutionally reproduced through war games, posture reviews, and strategic narratives that sacralize the bomb as a symbol of national identity and order. By mythologizing “successes” like the Cuban Missile Crisis and erasing inconvenient cases like Korea or Kargil, strategic elites have turned deterrence into a kind of civil religion, one resistant to critique and inherited across generations as both trauma and orthodoxy. Counter-belief traditions, from hibakusha testimony to ICAN’s humanitarian framing, challenge this orthodoxy by foregrounding ethics, empathy, and human costs—but the deterrence myth persists because it provides states with coherence, legitimacy, and the illusion of control in the face of existential dread. The book ultimately asks: if deterrence is a story we tell to survive, can humanity learn to believe otherwise

This research challenges structuralist models of nuclear posture, most notably Vipin Narang’s optimization typology, by arguing that posture should be understood not as a fixed output of regime type, alliances, or force balance but as a dynamic form of strategic signaling. Through what it calls the Strategic Ends-Based Theory of Nuclear Posture, the piece reconceptualizes posture as a repertoire of communicative acts—tests, declarations, deployments, ambiguities—performed to serve shifting political ends such as deterrence, coercion, reassurance, escalation control, and domestic legitimacy. Posture, in this view, is flexible, adaptive, and audience-sensitive, layered with signals for adversaries, allies, publics, and third parties. Case studies of North Korea, India, and Pakistan from 2000–2024 demonstrate that all three recalibrated their postures without major structural transformation: Pyongyang from catalytic ambiguity to coercive precision, New Delhi from assured retaliation toward counterforce ambiguity, and Islamabad from overt escalation threats toward calibrated restraint. These shifts reveal posture not as identity but as performance—strategic communication that evolves through reassessment, audience feedback, organizational learning, and technological opportunity. The article concludes that analysts and policymakers must stop treating posture as static doctrine and instead read it as strategy: a language of nuclear statecraft, performed, interpreted, and recalibrated in pursuit of political ends.

This research introduces Selective Realignment Protocols (SRPs) as a new class of governance instruments designed to manage sustained noncompliance in fragmented international regimes. Rather than relying on blunt tools like sanctions, treaty amendment, or universal enforcement, SRPs function as treaty-adjacent scaffolds: actor-specific, procedurally embedded frameworks that impose sequenced obligations, delegate monitoring to trusted technical institutions, and offer conditional reintegration pathways. Using the JCPOA as a paradigmatic case and drawing analogies from trade, climate, and human rights, the article argues that SRPs fill the widening gap between universal legal norms and political feasibility by providing international organizations with a mid-spectrum tool to recalibrate deviant behavior while preserving regime integrity. However, SRPs carry risks of norm bifurcation, legal incoherence, and geopolitical selectivity, particularly in North–South contexts, which can erode legitimacy if not carefully governed. To mitigate these dangers, the article proposes design principles centered on transparent initiation criteria, institutional embedding, time-bound reintegration tracks, and deliberative accountability. Ultimately, SRPs are framed as both a theoretical innovation in compliance governance and a pragmatic pathway for sustaining institutional authority in an era of contested norms and multipolar strain.

This article critiques the growing use of the three-body problem metaphor in U.S. nuclear strategy, which likens the United States, Russia, and China to celestial bodies trapped in chaotic orbits. While rhetorically powerful, the analogy is deeply misleading: it imports deterministic assumptions from astrophysics that erase agency, diplomacy, and institutional design from international politics. By framing multipolarity as inherently unstable and collapse as inevitable, the metaphor encourages strategic fatalism—arms racing, resistance to arms control, and neglect of crisis-management mechanisms. Drawing on historical examples, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Cold War arms control agreements, the article argues that stability has always been a constructed outcome of choices, not a passive product of structure. It proposes alternative models—complex adaptive systems, iterated games, and ecological balance—that better capture agency, learning, and norm evolution in nuclear politics. Ultimately, the essay warns that metaphors matter: if policymakers imagine today’s tripolar nuclear environment through the lens of gravitational inevitability, they may foreclose the very diplomatic and strategic innovations needed to prevent catastrophe.

This article develops a general theory of wormhole escalation, expanding on Rebecca Hersman’s insight that modern crises often bypass the stepwise logic of classical “escalation ladders.” Whereas Cold War models assumed sequential reciprocity—adversaries interpreting moves as proportionate within a shared grammar—today’s multi-domain environment produces discontinuities driven by interpretive divergence, cross-domain translation failures, and velocity mismatches. Crises no longer climb rungs; they tumble through wormholes where signals are misread, proportionality collapses, and escalation leaps unpredictably across cyber, conventional, nuclear, and symbolic domains. Through case studies of the 2017 Qatar diplomatic rupture, the 2019 India–Pakistan Balakot crisis, and the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war, the article shows how cyber intrusions, terrorism, and infrastructure attacks triggered sudden escalatory leaps unaccounted for by ladder-based theory. The core claim is that strategic stability now depends less on arsenal balances than on interpretive infrastructures—norms, backchannels, definitions, and translation mechanisms—that allow adversaries to clarify intent and manage ambiguity before wormholes cascade. Without such frameworks, deterrence risks collapse not from deliberate aggression but from misinterpretation, making inadvertence a structural, not exceptional, feature of twenty-first-century escalation.

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This article argues that nuclear deterrence is no longer undermined primarily by missile gaps or arsenal imbalances, but by deliberate manipulation of perception, cognition, and belief in the digital battlespace. Drawing on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and Reflexive Control theory, it shows how adversaries like Russia exploit fear conditioning, cognitive biases, emotional contagion, and neuropsychological fatigue to degrade deterrence credibility from within. Case studies—including Russia’s annexation of Crimea, interference in the 2016 U.S. election, cyberattacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure, deepfake manipulation, and algorithm-driven cultural conditioning—demonstrate how disinformation and deception erode trust in institutions, fracture interpretive coherence, and render deterrent signals illegible. The paper advances a neurocognitive theory of deterrence degradation, reframing credibility as a function not only of capability and will but of psychological resilience and belief security. It concludes with policy recommendations for democratic states: building societal “cognitive defenses,” strengthening narrative resilience, authenticating information environments, and coordinating alliance-wide psychological safeguards. In the 21st century, deterrence is as much about defending minds and meanings as it is about missiles.