Hannah Haegeland

Hannah Haegeland is a Research Fellow in the International Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center. She is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia National Laboratories’ Cooperative Monitoring Center where she previously directed South Asia research and engagement and work in the Middle East. Hannah is a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University, completing a joint degree in the Departments of the History of Science and Technology and Political Science with support from the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. She applies her interdisciplinary training and professional experience to research on global security, with a focus on nuclear issues and the global history of military technology in Asia.  

Hannah’s dissertation, Before the Bomb: Nuclear Latency in Pakistan, 1947–98, is an account of global nuclear science and technology in the 20th century. Informed by new archival sources, it offers the first history of nuclear Bangladesh and a novel analysis of Pakistan’s nuclear programs before its 1998 nuclear weapons tests, emphasizing the shaping effects of the country’s first three decades. After World War II, states began forming security strategies related broadly to nuclear technologies and specifically to nuclear weapons long before they chose whether to pursue enrichment and reprocessing capabilities. Strategic communities around the world developed varying degrees of technical and nontechnical nuclear expertise by observing and participating in the many wars of the global Cold War, and through scientific, agricultural, medical, energy, and security cooperation. The historical context of this ‘latent’ nuclear learning explains the shifting conditions over time for how, why, and to what effects on regional and global security environments states forswear, pursue, and possess nuclear weapons. 

Before the Bomb advocates a new approach to the study of nuclear histories with key implications for the policies of (and policies addressing) current and potential future nuclear-armed states related to proliferation, deterrence, escalation, and global nuclear risk reduction—including prospects for the eventual renewal of arms control and disarmament.  

More information on Hannah’s nuclear policy and academic work is available at: https://hannahhaegeland.com/.