Talking Nukes, Quantum, and Innovation at IGCC’s Postdoc Conference

On May 7 in Washington, D.C., IGCC hosted the annual conference of the 2024–25 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Technology and International Security, the program’s culminating event featuring presentations from fellows before an audience of leading social scientists. Presentations explored how nuclear weapons, clean energy and quantum technologies, and defense innovation are influencing today’s rapidly changing international security environment, and leveraged knowledge from both past and present to enable greater understanding of a new era of international relations in the 21st century.

“The conference brings the postdocs together with a dream team of their hand-picked discussants before a community of interest that includes leadership from the University of California and the National Labs, who support the fellowship,” said Neil Narang, IGCC research director and associate professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara, who serves as director for the fellowship. The distinguished list of attendees included the directors of the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories Kim Budil and Thom Mason (respectively); June Yu, vice president for the UC National Laboratories Office; and other senior leaders from the labs.

“The event not only showcases the strength of our emerging talent, it also reminds us of the ongoing challenge and opportunity in bridging the languages of science, technology, and policy,” noted June Yu. “That translation is essential if we’re going to meet the demands of decision-making in areas where the stakes are high, and the pace of change is accelerating.”

The presentations began with Spenser Warren’s examination of great-power nuclear rivalry through the lens of Russian strategic nuclear modernization under Vladimir Putin. Asking why Russia is modernizing its arsenal and what accounts for the selection of specific weapons, Warren concludes that the perceived threat from advancing U.S. technology motivates modernization while domestic variables influence the types of weapons Russia choses to deploy, describing this “combination of strategic and status factors,” that drive the process. His discussant was Dmitry Adamsky, professor at Reichman University in Israel, who praised the work’s theoretical relevance beyond Russia and advised further exploration of Russian views on nuclear arms races and how corruption impacts the country’s nuclear modernization drive. “The comments I received from Prof. Adamsky and the rest of the audience were phenomenal,” said Warren, “and will be instrumental in helping me improve my project as it nears completion.” In the fall, Warren will be joining the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as a Stanton nuclear security fellow.

Next, Eleni Ekmektsioglou took a historical view of technological change within militaries, delving into the role of organizational culture in whether armed forces embrace or reject emerging technologies. Pushing back on conventional wisdom, which sees militaries as rational actors driven to maximize their technological capacity, Ekmektsioglou’s archival research highlights how organizational biases, battlefield uncertainty, historical experience, and other factors can inhibit the operationalization of new technologies by military establishments, with an eye toward understanding how such processes play out in the present day. Austin Long, deputy director for strategic stability at The Joint Staff, provided feedback on Ekmektsioglou’s paper, suggesting she dive deeper into how “lab-like” wars affect technological uptake—such as how the Spanish Civil War acted as a staging ground for World War II, or how the Ukraine war is showcasing new military technologies in the 21st century. 

Sarah Bidgood continued by examining how the risks of emerging technologies can be contained diplomatically, using historical case studies to ask what brings leaders to the negotiating table to limit the scope of dangerous new tech. Looking at nuclear crises from the 20th century, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the U.S.-Soviet standoff during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Bidgood examined how crises can create windows of opportunity for nuclear rivals to find common ground and pursue arms control—but only when leaders possess a preexisting belief in the dangers of nuclear weapons. James Goldgeier, professor of international relations at the School of International Service at American University, and a former IGCC dissertation fellow, advised that it could be fruitful also to look at the role of bureaucracies in bringing about arms control negotiations. Bidgood will continue this research in her second year as an IGCC postdoctoral fellow.

Then, Juljan Krause moved the conversation from states to the role of large multinational corporations in emerging technological fields. Krause shared his research on the paradox of why large tech firms known as “hyperscalers”—which control most Internet data through their dominance of compute, storage, and security infrastructure—are leading research efforts into the quantum Internet. Krause noted that the application of quantum entanglement to computation presents an opportunity to decentralize the World Wide Web by allowing users to perform tasks on the hyperscalers’ servers without revealing input, processes, or output to these companies, allowing users greater privacy but eroding the market power the hyperscalers enjoy via their access to data. Krause sees the hyperscalers’ quantum research as an attempt to embed themselves into a potential quantum Internet—a strategic hedge to protect their power and use a first-mover advantage to help set standards to their benefit. Laura DeNardis, professor and endowed chair of technology, ethics, and society at Georgetown University,  recommended that Krause expand on the defensive applications of quantum research and how the hyperscalers’ interest may be in quantum key distribution cryptography, which can help defend their systems against sophisticated hacking attempts.

“It was an incredible finale to my fellowship to have such a rare opportunity to present my research not only to two National Lab directors, but also to one of the world’s foremost scholars in Internet governance,” said Krause, who is completing his second-and-final year of the fellowship before taking a position at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

After a break, Colleen Larkin turned the discussion towards the ideational aspects of how emerging technologies are applied to international security matters by presenting on the role of strategic narratives in the development of U.S. nuclear strategy. Larkin’s research explores the contradictory impulses within early U.S. nuclear policy: of treating, on the one hand, the atomic bomb as a revolutionary weapon whose purpose is to deter, and, on the other, as a more conventional weapon that adversaries ought to achieve warfighting superiority in. Larkin uses archival data to explore the emergence of a dominant narrative among U.S. political elites which she terms “waging deterrence,” a synthesis of both schools of thought. Nina Tannenwald, senior lecturer in political science at Brown University, suggested elaborating on the theory of how debates among elites are translated into policy outcomes. 

“The annual conference packs in a tremendous amount of interesting research, thoughtful questions, and stimulating conversations for just one day,” reflected Larkin, who will be returning for the second year of the fellowship. “Even though I’m familiar with the other postdocs’ work, the comments and questions from the room offered new perspectives and many ideas for future research.”

The final presentation was delivered by Nicolas Wittstock, who examined the role of the state in promoting innovation to expand the realm of emerging technologies with applications in both the military and civilian worlds. Wittstock’s research looks at how despite the United States’ reputation as a climate laggard, the U.S. federal government is a surprising leader in clean energy innovation through its Department of Defense (DOD). Wittstock traces the history of DOD’s climate and energy security concerns as a driver of public spending on research and development of clean energy technologies, mapping patent citation networks to demonstrate the department’s leadership in low-carbon innovation. David Hart, professor of public policy at George Mason University and senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council of Foreign Relations, provided feedback, encouraging Wittstock to refine how innovation is defined to go beyond patents and into how new inventions are operationalized in the real world. Wittstock will continue his research into U.S. federal innovation policy next year as a faculty member at Boston University.

The conference capped off a successful fourth year of the fellowship, which will welcome four new fellows in the upcoming 2025–26 cohort, three of whom attended the conference: Dominic Brennan from the United Kingdom’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero; Eunji Emily Kim from the Georgia Institute of Technology; Jung Jae Kwon from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Belfer Center; and Adi Rao from Cornell University. Stay tuned to see more of the work from current and future fellows published through IGCC.