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.
How do latent nuclear capabilities in the form of enrichment and reprocessing facilities affect interstate deterrence and coercion? Recent scholarship suggests that latency creates a “virtual” nuclear capability that can be used to deter threats or extract concessions, but these findings run counter to research demonstrating that states cannot deter without at least a deliverable nuclear device. This presentation aims to investigate this puzzling inconsistency by employing statistical analysis on an expanded dataset of latency measures and a variety of both military and bargaining outcomes.