Today’s increasingly tense and multipolar security landscape requires a reinvigoration of nuclear crisis control—a variety of mechanisms and strategies that can reduce risks and escalation during crises involving nuclear states. As states continue to modernize their arsenals, and novel technologies integrate with strategic weapons, the global nuclear stability landscape will evolve and so too must the tools that have been historically utilized to mitigate nuclear risk.
Through this effort, IST seeks to reinvigorate nuclear crisis control methods by encouraging the ideation and, when appropriate, adoption of novel risk reducing crisis control tools—leveraging opportunities created by new technologies while also being proactive in minimizing the inherent risks induced by the same technologies.
Additional Resources:
Atlas of Crisis Communications: Nuclear States: IST’s Leah Walker and Andy Facini provide baselining of existing communication channels, listing publicly known hotlines between states with nuclear weapons.
Playing Telephone: Hoax Calls and the Insecurity of Leader to Leader Communications: IST’s Leah Walker provides an examination of the interesting, and concerning, phenomenon of successful hoax calls to world leaders.
Zoom Won’t Stop a Nuclear War: IST’s Leah Walker and ELN’s Sahil Shah, write in Foreign Policy on why nuclear-armed states must rethink crisis communications technology.
Nuclear Hotlines: Origins, Evolution, Applications: This paper by Dr. Steven E. Miller gives an overview of experiences to-date with nuclear hotlines. It reviews the history of the US-Russia hotline, describes the ways that hotlines can be used or misused, and charts how the hotline concept has evolved and propagated to help states manage international crises. The paper shows hotlines as important, if imperfect, tools for avoiding nuclear conflict.
Last Chance: Communicating at the Nuclear Brink Scenarios Workshop Synthesis Report: This paper introduces the CATALINK system. CATALINK would build on the “hotline” model of previous generations and rely on internationally driven open-source technologies to maximize user integrity and trust.
Preventing the onset or escalation of conflict by building a resilient global communications system.
