Dissertation Project
One Step at a Time: The Logic of Escalation and the Benefits of Conventional Power Preponderance in the Nuclear Age – article version
In my dissertation, I examine the benefits of conventional military superiority in a nuclear world. Nuclear weapons render conventional war among great powers obsolete. Yet, nuclear powers compete to gain conventional superiority, with the United States spending hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain conventional preponderance. I argue that the rationale behind this is that there is a security benefit to having conventional options for escalation in disputes with nuclear adversaries. To explain this, I utilize the methaphor of the escalation ladder to say that in a dispute each state has a certain number of rungs, or conventional options for the use of force, to which they can escalate. The more missions a state’s military force can execute, the more conventional options, or rungs, it has on its escalation ladder. States also have a point of resolve, or the level of intensity of conflict after which the costs of conflict outweight the benefits of winning the dispute. Conventional options prevent states from having to choose escalating beyond their point of resolve or backing down. If a state has a greater number of conventional options than its adversary, it is better able to coerce its adversary into backing down. Because threats of nuclear escalation are more credible over core interests, the security benefit of conventional options is larger in disputes over peripheral interests. I test this argument with a quantitative overview of all disputes between nuclear-armed states from 1961-2018 along with four case studies of nuclear crises: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1958-61, the Taiwan Straits Crises of 1954-55 and 1958, and the Gulf War.
Other projects
The Illusory Nuclear Taboo, with Michael Goldfien and Matthew Graham – paper
The non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945 is a defining feature of the nuclear age. Prominent historical research argues that this pattern of non-use is due to a taboo against nuclear use. Recent survey experimental work argues that the public exhibits little opposition to nuclear use and is responsive to its military benefits. How can we reconcile these two findings in the literature? We argue that under reasonable conditions there can be an illusion of taboo: consistent opposition to nuclear use despite no true categorical aversion. People can be persuaded to support nuclear use, but in most potential real-world instances of nuclear use, they will be opposed because the downsides of nuclear weapons in terms of civilian casualties, environmental destruction, and international opprobrium would be so high. We test this argument with a survey experiment that independently varies more features of a nuclear strike than prior work and find that whe nuclear weapons have their typical negative downsides, the public is less supportive and less persuaded by their military benefits. This builds a bridge between survey accounts of a permissive public and archival evidence of policymakers feeling constrained as if by a taboo.
The Current Wave of Thinking on Nuclear Weapons: A Critical Review, with Jean-François Bélanger
Infeasible Punishment and Non-credible Threats: Military and Political Feasibility of Nuclear Punishment and Policy Choices of Crisis Actors after Direct Nuclear Deterrence Failure, with Yang Gyu Kim and Lana Shehadeh
Counterproductive Counterproliferation: The Risks of Kinetic and Cyber Attacks on Nascent Nuclear Programs, with David Allison
Why Unbalanced Coalitions are Better at Balancing