Research

Book Manuscript: Nuclear Theologies: Narratives and the Development of Nuclear Strategy

Scholars have long debated the drivers of nuclear strategy and nuclear nonuse––whether US policymakers during the Cold War accepted mutual assured destruction or constantly tried to escape it. Yet strategy in practice blended these logics: decision-makers accepted the role of nuclear weapons as unusable deterrents, but also consistently pursued competitive strategies to prevail in nuclear wars as in conventional ones. These tensions persist even in contemporary nuclear strategy. Why did this strategy develop, and why did it persist despite frequent attempts to change it?

I posit that the development of US nuclear strategy was intertwined with the development of a dominant nuclear narrative which I label “Waging Deterrence.” In this narrative, the bomb had revolutionized world politics such that deterrence became the highest priority, but Soviet aggression rendered competition inevitable; only by maintaining nuclear superiority could the US hope to preserve security. This narrative emerged over time, a byproduct of competition among national security elites. I track the rise of this narrative across the entire Cold War, drawing on hand-coding of over 3000 opinion pieces. I then evaluate the narrative’s construction during the early Cold War, the effects of the narrative on strategy, and challenges to the narrative during the later Cold War. I find that this dominant narrative entrenched strategic contradictions by papering over them in a story that both constituted the “reality” of nuclear politics and cultivated commitments to sustaining it.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

“Nuclear Shibboleths: The logics and future of nuclear non-use”, International Organization (2024), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818324000341

Thomas Schelling argued that “The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.” To this, he added a question: “Can we make it through another half dozen decades?” Contemporary technological innovation, weapons proliferation, increased modernization efforts, and nuclear saber-rattling has made Schelling’s question an urgent one. Recently, there has been an explosion in literature attempting to test the resilience of non-use. These scholars have focused primarily on methodological innovations, generating an impressive body of evidence about the future of non-use. Yet we argue that this literature is theoretically problematic: it reduces mechanisms of nuclear non-use to a “rationalist” versus “normative” dichotomy which obscures distinct pathways to nuclear (non)use within each theoretical framework. With rationalist theories, the current literature commits the sin of conflation, treating what should be distinct mechanisms—cost and credibility–as a single causal story. With normative theories, scholars have committed a sin of omission, treating norms as structural, and overlooking mechanisms of norm contestation. We show that teasing out these different causal pathways reveals radically different expectations about the future of non-use, especially in a world of precision nuclear weapons.

“‘The Most Humane of All Weapons’: Discrimination, Airpower, and the Pragmatic Turn to Precision” (with Stacie Goddard), European Journal of International Security (2023), https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2023.21.

How did the norm of discrimination become the dominant yardstick to measure the ethics of US airpower? Conventional accounts suggest that as elites and publics embraced norms of discrimination, this pushed US air forces to adopt a precision doctrine, one that demands accurately striking military, and not civilian, targets. Relying on a pragmatic reading of norm contestation and settling, we suggest that conventional explanations have the causal story reversed: it was not the strengthening of the norm of discrimination that led US air forces to commit to precision bombing. It was the commitment to precision bombing that led to the strengthening of the norm of discrimination. As precision technology became available during the interwar period, air-force officers co-opted the language of discrimination to justify their emerging doctrine. This co-optation of the language of discrimination would not only settle these norms as the guiding ethics of airpower. It would also transform them, redefining these norms in ways that privileged the process of precision targeting, rather than the outcome of civilian harm.

Working Papers

“‘The Problem is to Find the Fresh Words’: Narratives, the Inner Circle, and Strategic Change” (under review)

United States presidents often promise new visions for nuclear strategy yet struggle to enact strategic revisions. What explains the striking continuity in U.S. nuclear strategy? Departing from existing accounts of bureaucratic inertia, I argue understanding strategic continuity requires attention to narratives, which tell stories about international politics and shape legitimate choices. I theorize narratives’ effects on strategy, positing that dominant narratives structures debates among the leader’s inner circle, defining legitimate rhetoric and granting power to participants implicated in the narrative. I track the rise of a dominant nuclear narrative, ‘Waging Deterrence,’ which depicted nuclear weapons as a revolutionary deterrent but emphasized the necessity of nuclear superiority to fight wars. It identified the Air Force as the primary stewards of the nuclear mission. I evaluate the theory using two cases of challenges to existing strategy during the Kennedy administration: the Navy’s push for a minimum deterrent, and Defense department civilians’ damage limitation strategies. In both cases, the Air Force leveraged its narrative power to fend off challengers and frustrate strategic adjustment. This paper offers a novel approach to nuclear strategy and bureaucratic politics, identifying rhetorical mechanisms that shape contestation in strategic decision-making and define enduring concepts in nuclear politics.

“Controlling the Apocalypse: Strategic Narrative Emergence and US Nuclear Strategy”

“Storytelling as the Blueprint: Strategic Narratives and Grand Strategy”

“War of Words: Legitimation, Essential Equivalence, and Carter’s Nuclear Strategy”