Speaker: Justin Key Canfil, Postdoctoral Fellow, International Security Program
If defense planners are paid to imagine the future of war, and military R&D is costly and uncertain, why do states so often invest in building technologies before banning them? This seminar advances a theory to explain why states expend limited resources on new weapons destined for the scrapheap. Anticipatory bans — which are far more common than even arms control proponents have suggested — are a hedging strategy for decisionmakers with pessimistic imaginations about the future of the security environment. When little is known about a candidate technology's potential, decisionmakers rely on competing advisory factions for forecasting information. Each faction has bureaucratic-organizational incentives to advise applying the gas or the brakes to R&D. As technologies approach their emergence point and more is learned, decisionmakers learn the true state of the world and rely on less divergent advice. However, this entails a tradeoff: deferring is risky because adversaries who learn to unlock the benefits of technology for themselves may become reluctant to return to the negotiating table.
Theoretical predictions are derived using a formal model and tested on four carefully selected case studies involving "exotic" technologies from the Cold War, drawn from newly declassified government records at seven archives. Importantly, the findings highlight how internal considerations about the unilateral utility of technologies can motivate anticipatory arms control even when default prerequisites — trust or verifiability, flexibility, distinguishability, and public momentum — are unsatisfied. the seminar concludes with implications for the management of 21st century emerging military technologies.
Everyone is welcome to join us online via Zoom! Please register in advance for this seminar: https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrdOisrDIoGtdmmrICWwepLUSA-gR1pIMP
