Events

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Join us for the third working meeting of the semester.

Join us for our fourth working group.

Join us in welcoming Dr. Jarret Lafleur, who will be presenting The Perfect Heist: Recipes from Around the World.

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Abstract:

Treaty Monitoring and Verification – Basic principles and some personal experiences

Nonproliferation and arms control monitoring provide key support to US national security and are strongly grounded in technology capabilities and technical expertise. When employed to verify a particular treaty, a variety of policy and political influences come into play. In this arena, the interaction between technical experts and (largely non-technical) policy-makers is central to making the best possible determinations. This presentation will outline the basic principles and illustrate with examples of how monitoring and verification of number of treaties (e.g. NPT, CTBT, New START) are implemented. Insights on what it is like to be part of a negotiation team, working to develop effective verification regimes (bi-lateral and multi-lateral), will round out the discussion.
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Abstract:

China’s Rejection of Tactical Nuclear Weapons in the late Cold War

After the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, China never deployed a tactical nuclear weapons capability to halt a Soviet invasion across its northern borders. Existing scholarship on nuclear strategy indicates that nuclear-weapon states deploy tactical nuclear weapons if they face the threat of a stronger military invading their territory. China’s decision not to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to halt a Soviet invasion is therefore frequently attributed to its leaders’ distinctive beliefs that nuclear weapons are not useful on the battlefield. New Chinese-language sources indicate, however, that Chinese leaders gave much more serious consideration to the option of deploying tactical nuclear weapons than is recognized in the existing literature. Further, these sources reveal that Chinese leaders decided not to deploy those weapons for strategic reasons. I offer the most complete account of the Chinese elite decision-making processes and outcomes related to tactical nuclear weapons in the late 1970s and early 1980s, drawing on new primary and secondary sources. Deng Xiaoping personally supported the initiation of a research and development program for a neutron bomb in 1978. That year, Chinese leaders also canceled an air-launched tactical nuclear weapons program and were developing short-range ballistic missiles that could have been used as nuclear delivery systems. By the early 1980s, however, Chinese leaders decided to rely on conventional military options, rather than tactical nuclear weapons, for halting a future Soviet invasion. These findings have implications for China’s views of the role of non-strategic nuclear weapons in its nuclear relationship with the United States today.
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Abstract:

Decision Tree Models of Deterrence Including Tactical Nuclear Weapons
Thomas Edmunds, Jeffrey Garrett, and Craig Wuest
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

In a conventional conflict between two nuclear-armed adversaries, one side might choose to escalate to limited nuclear use in order to deescalate a conflict that is going poorly. This option to strengthen deterrence is receiving renewed attention in light of last year’s release of the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review. The objective is to deter the aggressor from instigating a conventional conflict, and the study examines how the threat of use of a limited number of tactical nuclear weapon can contribute to that aim. We analyze the initial attacker’s decision process with a decision tree, where we represent the defender’s response as uncertainty nodes in the tree. This representation of the defender’s actions has two advantages. First, it captures the aggressor’s uncertainty about the defender’s choices by representing that behavior as chance nodes in the tree. Second, a parametric exploration of the defender probabilities reveals what signals and actions the defender can take to deter the attacker. For example, the probabilities assigned to various defender mobilization responses to mobilization by the attacker can reveal what levels are needed to prevent the attack from happening. We illustrate the method with a simple example involving launches of a single tactical nuclear weapon by either the attacker if the attack is stalled and/or the defender to stop the attack. We build the model using a commercial decision tree software package with capability for multivariate sensitivity analysis.
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Join us for another working meeting!

Join us for introductions, nukes in the news, and learn more about our plans for the Fall 2019 semester.

With the termination of the INF Treaty and the impending sunset of NEW START, what is the future of arms control in an era of strategic competition? Has the world fundamentally changed since the entry into force of the NPT almost 50 years ago and what does this mean for the future of the nonproliferation regime?
Join us to discuss and learn!

Join us as Manseok Lee presents current work on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

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