Alliances and Nuclear Risk: Evidence from the Cold War, Implications for Today

About

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In this seminar, Caitlin Talmadge and Brendan Green will explore whether, when, and how asymmetric alliance commitments to weaker states can lead to peacetime military policies that pose heightened risks of wartime escalation—particularly nuclear escalation. Their research design exploits the case of NATO’s 1979 “Dual Track” decision, which deployed hundreds of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and was uniformly interpreted as highly escalatory. The extant literature on alliances can explain neither why the United States and its European allies disagreed about this policy, nor why the more powerful United States acceded to the preferences of its weaker European partners to deploy the missiles. Using recently released primary documents from the Carter administration, Talmadge and Green carefully reconstruct U.S. decision-making, using the case to inductively generate a proto-theory of alliances and military escalation. They hypothesize that differential exposure to the costs of war can give alliance partners different preferences for escalation risk, and that concerns about alliance cohesion can increase the bargaining leverage of weaker states, leading to the adoption of more escalatory military policies than the great power prefers. This proto-theory can be refined and tested in future work, and has a number of potential implications for alliance management and military policy related to present American commitments in Europe and Asia.

Speakers

Caitlin Talmadge is Associate Professor of Security Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and Senior Non-Resident Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. In addition, she is a Research Affiliate in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she recently co-led the Project on Strategy Stability Evaluation, which convened dozens of scholars to discuss and publish research on the stability implications of emerging technologies. She is author of The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell, 2015), which Foreign Affairs named the Best Book in Security for 2016 and which won the 2017 Best Book Award from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. She also is co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy (Routledge, fourth edition forthcoming). Dr. Talmadge is a graduate of Harvard (A.B., Government) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., Political Science).

Brendan Green is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati. His most recent writing is on the dynamics of nuclear weapons and arms races during the Cold War and today, especially in his book The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Brendan has been published at The Journal of Strategic Studies, Security Studies, International Security, and other outlets for international affairs research and commentary. His articles have received two national awards for excellence.