Nuclear Weapons and Military Alliances

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Nuclear weapons are inseparable from deterrence in modern military alliances. States often use threats or promises of nuclear use to bolster or undermine the perceived credibility of alliance commitments. This panel explores the diverse consequences of using nuclear weapons to these ends. We consider how nuclear protection shapes military investments, alliance reassurance, tradeoffs between burden-sharing and non-proliferation, and reactions to nuclear threats. This panel brings together emerging scholars from all over the world to address important issues at the intersection of nuclear weapons and military alliances.

Alley addresses whether adversary nuclear threats provoke or intimidate support for intervention in a foreign crisis. Blankenship explores whether there is a trade-off between encouraging conventional defense burden-sharing and discouraging nuclear proliferation among allies, while Gannon studies how assurances of protection from nuclear patrons shape the conventional arming decisions of their allies. Ko and Lee focus on the ways in which the visibility of a nuclear patron’s assurances of protection shapes how reassured allies are by those signals of support. Sukin, Lanoszka and Herzog show how reassured U.S. allies were by American assurances of support in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• Provocation, Intimidation and Nuclear Threats - Joshua Alley, University College Dublin

• How Nuclear Allies Shape Conventional Armament Decisions - J Andres Gannon, Vanderbilt University

• Elite Preferences for Conventional Burden-Sharing and Nuclear Proliferation - Brian Blankenship, University of Miami

• The Visibility of Extended Security Commitments and Reassurance Effects - Do Young Lee, University of Oslo; Jiyoung Ko, Korea University

• U.S. Reassurance during the Russo-Ukrainian War - Lauren Sukin, London School of Economics; Alexander Lanoszka, University of Waterloo; Stephen Herzog, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

Chair

• Joshua Alley University College Dublin

Discussants

• Alexandre Debs Yale University

• Nicholas Miller Dartmouth College