Member Publications

4 Wu POSSEIV: Certainty of Uncertainty: Nuclear Strategy with Chinese Characteristics

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Drafts

China’s nuclear deterrent capability relies on so-called “first strike uncertainty,” which means letting the other side be unconfident of a completely successful first strike.  But the fact that the Soviet Union conducted nuclear threat against China in 1969 showed that first strike uncertainty must be high enough to deter nuclear attack or nuclear threat.  This article examines the threshold.  Only after China deployed the DF-3 intermediate-range ballistic missiles in mid-1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union began to believe China had some nuclear retaliatory capability.  Chinese

Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Security in South Asia

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White Papers

The term "strategic security" is ambiguous because it embraces a broad range of issues. It may refer to national, international, or global security issues. For example, on May 31, 2007, then Russian President Vladimir Putin used this term as a synonym for "strategic balance" when describing Russia’s nuclear weapons development programs and Russia’s relations with the United States and European countries. [Continue]

Goliath’s Curse: Coercive Threats and Asymmetric Power

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Journal Articles

States typically issue compellent threats against considerably weaker adversaries, yet their threats often fail. Why? Expanding on a standard model of international crisis bargaining, I argue that a theory of reputation-building can help shed light on this puzzle. The model casts reputation as a strategic problem, showing that challengers issuing compellent threats have incentives to anticipate the reputation costs that target states incur when appeasing aggressors.