Virtual Library

Our virtual library is an online repository of all of the reports, papers, and briefings that IST has produced, as well as works that have influenced our thinking.

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Reports

Why Venture Capital Is Indispensable for U.S. Industrial Strategy: Activating Investors to Realize Disruptive National Capabilities

Michael Brown and Pavneet Singh

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Reports

The Implications of Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity: Shifting the Offense-Defense Balance

Jennifer Tang, Tiffany Saade, Steve Kelly

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Fact Sheet

IST’s Efforts in the Age of AI: An Overview

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Reports

Unlocking U.S. Technological Competitiveness: Proposing Solutions to Public-Private Misalignments

Ben Purser, Pavneet Singh

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Articles

The Phone-a-Friend Option: Use Cases for a U.S.-U.K.-French Crisis Communication Channel

Daniil Zhukov

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Articles

China: Nuclear Crisis Communications and Risk Reduction

Dr. Tong Zhao

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Articles

Use-Cases of Resilient Nuclear Crisis Communications: A View from Russia

Dmitry Stefanovich

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We also welcome additional suggestions from readers, and will consider adding further resources as so much of our work has come through crowd-sourced collaboration already. If, for any chance you are an author whose work is listed here and you do not wish it to be listed in our repository, please, let us know.

SUBMIT CONTENT

A New Framework for Thinking about Regional NC3

Vipin Narang

SUMMARY

The brain of a state’s nuclear force structure is its command and control architecture and systems (NC3). Much of the proliferation and strategy literature focuses on the hardware of nuclear weapons—the actual production of warheads and delivery systems, ranges, accuracy, basing modes, payloads, MIRVs, missile defenses, and so on. But the software—the NC3 architecture that is charged with managing command, control, and communication under potentially extreme circumstances—is often overlooked or simply assumed or inferred, since much of it is unobservable because states (thankfully) rarely emerge from their peacetime postures.

In his paper, Dr. Vipin Narang challenges the delegative/assertive binary, arguing that, while conceptually important, it has hamstrung our thinking of regional powers’ NC3 by forcing them into one bin or another when it is in fact a time-dependent spectrum: all states delegate—that is, cede the ability to use nuclear weapons, irrespective of the authority to do so—at some point. Dr. Narang concludes that: “states may not only shift from assertive to delegative postures as a crisis or conflict evolves, but may also have variable NC3 postures for different legs of its force.”

This paper is accompanied by a Fourth Leg Podcast: When and Why Cede Nuclear Authority.

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