Five Questions on What History Can Teach Us About Today’s Nuclear World

We’re in a very different world than during the Cold War. How can your research on past nuclear crises help us understand the state of the nuclear world today?

In my work, I’m trying to understand what might revive U.S.-Russia arms control. This is a pressing issue now because several key nuclear agreements have collapsed or are close to expiring and the risk of nuclear weapons use is arguably higher than it has been in a long time. My research on historical nuclear crises helps to shine a light on when the two sides might come back to the negotiating table by looking at what drove them there in the past.

Currently, I’m particularly interested in this widespread conventional wisdom within the nuclear policy field that Cold War nuclear crises—events that brought leaders to the brink of nuclear war—motivated them to pursue arms control by awakening them to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the need for greater restraint. I ask: is this conventional wisdom supported empirically? Because if so, this suggests it might take another nuclear crisis to get arms control back on track today—which is a scary thought.

To answer this question, I look at past nuclear crises and the policies leaders pursued in their aftermath. I find that, even though some nuclear crises—like the Cuban Missile Crisis—were followed by arms control, that’s not true in every case. And even in the cases where it is true, the evidence suggests that it’s really leaders’ preexisting belief in the value of arms control for preventing nuclear war that accounts for this outcome, not new lessons learned from the crisis itself. John F. Kennedy, for instance, was already a huge supporter of arms control long before the Cuban Missile Crisis; my research indicates that this event just helped to create a window of opportunity for him to better put those beliefs into practice.

This suggests that a future nuclear crisis isn’t automatically going to lead to a revival of arms control. In fact, if the president at the time thinks a more credible deterrent is the best way to prevent a nuclear war—not arms control—you could end up with an arms buildup instead.

How do you translate the insights gleaned from looking at John F. Kennedy’s actions during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, to how a Joe Biden or Donald Trump—even a Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping—deals with these threats in the 2020s?

What I see from my historical work is that individual leaders’ beliefs have had an outsized impact on the nuclear policies they pursue once in office. This relationship really comes through in the archives, where you see what those beliefs were before they were elected, how little they evolved while in office, and how they directly informed their strategies for managing nuclear risks while there.

When it comes to contemporary U.S. leaders, it’s a little harder to trace this process because we don’t have access to the declassified record yet. With respect to leaders of other countries, as an American researcher, I might not ever have access to those records. So we need to be cautious about assuming that we can say with a lot of accuracy what Trump, or Putin, or Xi believe about nuclear risk and how to manage it right now.

But what we do know from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology is that people are people, and our beliefs and cognitive biases influence how we make decisions in roughly the same ways irrespective of where we’re from. I think it’s safe to assume that the beliefs of leaders today are shaping their nuclear policies to the same degree as leaders in the past, it’s just harder to say precisely what those beliefs are and what specific policy outcomes they are informing in the moment.

It sounds like this research approach embodies a number of different disciplines— international relations, psychology, cognitive science, cultural studies—how do you disentangle them all to make sense of nuclear decision-making?

I’m fundamentally interested in how people make decisions in the face of uncertainty. This is almost always what’s happening in the nuclear space, so in my work, I try to make use of all the tools in the toolkit to get those insights. This means looking at the questions I’m interested in through an interdisciplinary lens. It also means using everything from traditional social science research methods to different open-source analytical approaches to get answers.

Broadly, though, I would say my research approach fits into a larger behavioral turn in international relations where people leverage findings from cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and even neuroscience, to understand how decisionmakers actually behave rather than how we expect them to.

The results often challenge normative theories of behavior—like rational deterrence theory—with really significant implications for nuclear policy. They help us understand why attempting to deter an adversary can have the opposite effect, or why adversaries might cooperate on arms control even when doing so makes them more vulnerable.

What can the past tell us about where we’re headed in a time of new nuclear risks?

It’s difficult to say. New START is expiring, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty is facing challenges, which suggests we’re in for a very uncertain and dangerous time. But what we know from history that if a leader believes in the value of arms control and decides they want to pursue it, they have a lot of latitude to make that happen.

For example, in 1963, Kennedy decided on his own to declare that the United States would not conduct above-ground nuclear tests in the interest of showing the Soviet Union that he was serious about negotiating limits on nuclear testing. Just a couple of months later, the two sides and the United Kingdom signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty. This shows us that it’s possible for leaders to make progress on arms control even in a difficult geopolitical environment if there’s sufficient political will.

We may end up finding that this is the case today. There have been moments on the campaign trail and during both his first and second terms where Trump has spoken about his fears surrounding nuclear use and his perception that these are really dangerous weapons. He’s mentioned not wanting to see New START expire.

Granted, it’s hard to tell if there will ultimately be any meat put on the bones of these statements. It’s still early in his second term. But these statements raise the possibility that there could be some arms control deals to be made even in this era of great power rivalry—if this is something Trump is interested in doing and is willing to throw his weight behind.

What do you have to say to students who are considering making their start in this field?

My advice to students is to find something you are genuinely interested in, and there will almost always be a toehold within the nuclear space. This field gets at so many broad issues and brings them together in ways that very few other fields do, whether that’s history, science and engineering, social science, journalism, the arts, what have you.

As you hopefully got a sense from this interview, I’m really interested in history, U.S.-Russia relations, and human psychology. Even though the specific issues I’m looking at have to do with nuclear policy, my research agenda and approach give me a lens to look at these bigger questions about why people make the choices they make which I find fundamentally intriguing.

If you think this field might be for you, figure out the specific angles you’re interested in and go explore them. I think that’s the best way to guarantee a fulfilling career in this space.

Sarah Bidgood is a postdoctoral fellow in technology and international security at IGCC, based in Washington, D.C.