To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
What factors explain the origins of command and control systems in regional nuclear powers? Command and control systems underpin the deterrent capacity of a state’s nuclear arsenal, determine the likelihood of unintended nuclear use, and affect the likelihood of a conventional conflict escalating across the nuclear threshold. Despite their strategic importance, however, nuclear command and control systems have received limited analysis beyond the context of the Cold War superpowers.
This project makes three contributions to the study of command and control in regional nuclear powers. First, Arceneaux provides a new conceptual typology that classifies command and control systems according to arsenal management procedures during crises. Second, he presents a theoretical framework that demonstrates how three variables interact to explain command and control outcomes in regional nuclear powers: the presence of a proximate and conventionally superior adversary, domestic threats to the political regime, and the military’s level of organizational autonomy. Third, he evaluates the theory with original interview data from military and political elites in India, Pakistan, and apartheid-era South Africa. This project provides new insights into academic debates and yields implications for policymakers seeking to promote nuclear stability in regional nuclear powers.
David Arceneaux
David Arceneaux is a postdoctoral fellow with the Belfer Center's Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program. David holds a Ph.D. in political science from Syracuse University. He is currently developing a book project on the origins of command and control systems in regional nuclear powers. David was previously a predoctoral fellow at the MIT Security Studies Program. His research has received support from the Smith Richardson Foundation and Tobin Project, among others.
