Emerging technologies and strategic stability in peacetime, crisis, and war

European nuclear weapons? Zombie debates and nuclear realities

“…First, ongoing and future technological developments could further reduce the controllability of nuclear deterrence and escalation. Trends that appear to point in this direction include revolutions in military and dual-use technologies, the development of new cyber capabilities that increase nuclear vulnerabilities and uncertainty, increasing entanglement of nuclear and non-nuclear weapon systems, and the introduction of social media nuclear signalling and deep-fake videos (Burford 2019, Sechser et al 2019, Acton 2020. As pointed out by Unal and Lewis (2018, p. 2): "Many of the assumptions on which current nuclear strategies are based pre-date the current widespread use of digital technology".…”

Regulating emerging technology in times of crisis: Digital contact tracing in Norway during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Crises include wars, famines, epidemics, large financial downturns, and cyber-attacks, and the effects of crises can be both immediate and long-term (Ansell et al, 2010). Crises can both facilitate and destroy technological innovations (Archibugi et al, 2013;Schumpeter, 1934;Sechser et al, 2019;Talmadge, 2019). For instance, Meijer et al (2019) show that during a range of different crises, new technologies, applications, and digital networks have been used to create and share information and reduce transaction costs for collaboration.…”

Emerging technology and nuclear security: What does the wisdom of the crowd tell us?

“…We are not concerned with the emergence of these technologies themselves but rather with the emergence of the strategic applications of these technologies (Bauer, 2020). Scholars have previously captured the strategic consequences of different emerging technologies, noting that these new technologies have produced a variegated, often contradictory, set of effects on strategic stability and nuclear deterrence (Futter, 2020;Sechser et al, 2019;Talmadge, 2017). Thus, any impact that emerging technologies have on credibility, capability, signaling, or the perception of these three, will have an impact on nuclear deterrence.…”

“…Scholars and practitioners have begun to study the intersection of emerging technologies and nuclear deterrence (Acton, 2018(Acton, , 2020Chyba, 2020;Sechser et al, 2019;Williams, 2020). Much of this work focuses on the impact that emerging technologies have on risk perception, crisis instability, and crisis escalation.…”