India’s Nuclear Weapons: Connecting Civil-Military Relations & Nuclear Posture, with David Arceneaux
David Arceneaux’s research seeks to explain the factors affecting command and control patterns in emerging nuclear nations. This project addresses a gap in the political science literature by focusing on a state’s nuclear posture, a topic that has received far less attention than nuclear proliferation.
Arceneaux’s argument is that the status of pre-nuclear civil-military relations strongly predicts the command and control systems of a new nuclear state. To support this claim, Arceneaux conducts a within-case analysis of India and empirically evaluates a set of competing hypotheses. The findings from this project aim to help US foreign policy practitioners understand how emerging nuclear states might behave in the future and what the proactive or reactive measures that the US might take.
Arceneaux is a Syracuse University Ph.D. student in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations.
[separatorline]Presented through the Andrew Berlin Family National Security Research Fund