Understanding Schelling's Nuclear Paradigms with Francis J. Gavin

[MUSIC] Welcome to Horns of Adelaima, the podcast of the Texas National Security Review. I'm Shina Chestnut-Gritens, Editor-in-Chief of TNSR, and I'm here with Dr. Ryan Best, our Executive Editor. Today, we're pleased to be joined by Professor Frank Gabin, author of the article, Strategic Stability and its Limits, Reflections on Shelling, which appears in the special issue of the Texas National Security Review. Frank Gabin is distinguished professor and director of the Henry Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the School for Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He also serves as chair of the editorial board for the Texas National Security Review, so we're delighted to welcome him in both capacities today. He is the author of most recently, The Taming of Scarsity and the Problems of Plenty, rethinking international relations and American grand strategy in a new era, and two books that came out in 2025, Thinking Historically, A Guide to State Craft and Strategy, and Wonder and Worry, Contemporary History in an Age of Uncertainty. Frank, welcome back to Horns of Adelaima. It's great to have you on the show. >> Great to see you, Shina, Ryan. This is fun to be on sort of the other end of the microphone here. This is good. >> Yeah, it's great. We're glad to have you here, especially with this article. I love this article because it centers on Thomas Shelling, who's such a foundational thinker of the nuclear age. As we get started today, I was wondering if for listeners who may not be as familiar with him, if you could talk about Shelling and why his work still looms so large over how we think about nuclear strategy today? >> Sure. Ryan, you're absolutely right. The Shelling is his foundational thinker. There's a whole variety of reasons for that. I think the clarity of his prose is clear, brilliant, incisive analysis. But it's interesting because he was not a strategist per se. He was an economist. In fact, he studied industrial economics and market organization. He got involved in really the origins of security studies. The way people decided to wrestle with and think about the nuclear question. There's several foundational thinkers of which he's one of them. Probably the big three are him, Albert Wallstetter, and then Bernard Brody. He's a fascinating character because he was an economist in a lot of ways associated with what we think about game theory, although interestingly in his Nobel speech for economics, he actually derided game theory. But whose major works just had an incredible influence on how people thought about how nuclear weapons affected international politics, and particularly American grand strategy. To the point that he still, I would argue, is if you were to ask people what's the first or most important thing you read about nuclear weapons, nuclear strategy, Shelling is at the top of the list. So foundational thinker. >> Let me follow up on something you said just a minute ago, which is that Shelling is a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He's not a historian. He's not a traditional military strategist. And I'm wondering when you were writing this essay and in the years that you've reflected on Shelling's body of work, how do you think that that background shapes his approach to stability, deterrence, the use of force? And in what ways then did that help him see things differently than a lot of the other thinkers at the time? >> Yeah, it's a great question, Shelling. And I think it has to do with the fact that nuclear weapons generate a whole series of extraordinary dilemmas. The most obvious one being that at heart, these weapons really aren't usable in battlefield. That the use of thermonuclear weapons would be such a horrendous catastrophe that generates this dilemma. You have this incredibly powerful weapon. It's a tool of your strategy and state craft. But at heart, it's probably to use it would be a reflection of failure. And so instead of throwing his hands up in the air, which many people did, or talk about ideas of eliminating all the nuclear weapons in the world, or thinking about finding a way to use them in the battlefield, I think Shelling was drawn to the idea of how do you get out of this puzzle? How can you find ways to generate political benefits, even leverage from the existence of these weapons that in many ways negate the whole notion of advantage that we associate with military technology? >> I love talking about this. For those that don't know, as the Chair of Artitorial Board Frank is always pushing us to bring more of a historical perspective to the journal and publish more historical pieces. And one of the things I love about this is at the heart of the article, you write that by exploring the tensions and Shelling's work, we can better assess what lessons from the past apply to emerging technologies today, and really use the historical paradigm to look at that. But I have to wonder, is strategic stability even the right ambition for this? Why did you feel that this re-examination was necessary right now? So I had found, and it would be interesting, Gina, if you find this too, I would talk to both my academic friends and my policy friends, and they would talk about how the goal of American policy was strategic stability. And it was almost assumed that everyone knew what that was, and it was an unalloyed good like motherhood and apple pie. And yet, when you would ask people, well, what does it mean? People would just look at you crazy, like, well, we assume that we know what it would have meant. And there's a lot of things that you kind of think in the back of your head, and you sort of wonder about. So when I thought about strategic stability, and I think what Shelling's most influential contribution, which I recognized in this article, was his contribution to the idea that states should get together to negotiate limits on how many weapons they should build, what kind of weapons and what posture, because nuclear weapons at a certain point don't generate advantage, and in fact can be destabilizing. And you can make the case that these notions of strategic stability that he had led directly to the intellectual architecture that led to the strategic arms limitations, talks and treaties. But there were sort of, when I would start digging through the record, there were some tensions. On the one hand, strategic stability seemed to be oriented towards the idea of never giving either side the incentive to go first. And to accept a sort of mutual vulnerability that would lead both sides exposed to catastrophe. But if you go through the history, American leaders understandably were never comfortable with that mutual vulnerability. There were brief periods during when Mac, Mara was Secretary of Defense, where it was kind of accepted as policy, but more or less. And for reasons you could understand, American leaders weren't very comfortable with that. But there was sort of a deeper tension for me. And that was the fact that another important element of American grand strategy was limiting nuclear proliferation. And its key tool to limit nuclear proliferation was to extend its nuclear umbrella. In other words, to protect other states with its nuclear forces. Now, this was problematic, because it was an incredible promise to make. We all know the story of, would you trade Pittsburgh for Paris? But the United States, in its efforts to make that promise credible, did a variety of things that were destabilizing for the strategic relationship. For example, the United States has always reserved the right to go first. It has developed weapons systems that are counter force, meaning they are targeting the adversary's military capabilities. It has had strategies that look preemptive. The idea being that if a conflict breaks out, we're going to use these weapons first in order to disable and disarm the adversary's ability to respond. That cuts against every notion of strategic stability. Yet it actually is a key element to proliferation stability. So as I thought about this, and I looked through the documents, I saw all these tensions, the tensions between no one could define this or say what it was. The idea that having strategic stability and mutual vulnerability, both was somewhat unnatural, but it also cut against another important goal that the United States had, which was proliferation stability. And I think this generates a whole bunch of interesting tensions that don't surface very easily. And at least as I tried to show in the article that I can't find evidence that shelling was necessarily grappled with these tensions. So one of the things that I really like about the special issue on strategic stability and emerging technology that this essay appears in is how much it explicitly grapples with questions about uncertainty and contradiction. And that's really an interesting part of the historical perspective that you bring in because I remember talking about both nuclear coercion from shelling and strategic stability and some discussion of whether these goals were intention, but you lay out really well. really, really clearly that shelling's writing sometimes seemed to point in opposite directions. And one body of his writing is stabilizing and the other is not. How do you make sense when you're grappling with a thinker as foundational as shelling? How do you make sense of their own inconsistencies? Do you think he ever resulted or came down over time on one paradigm or another? Or did this just persist throughout his intellectual life? So I've got a good news story and a bad news story here. Shelling was an economist. Economists spend a lot of their times trying to find generate ways to eliminate uncertainty through their formula, right? An uncertainty is often seen as a problem to be solved. Where as we who deal in the world of international politics, it's actually a reality that never goes away. And so shelling had the instinct, I think, that many leaders have and many people have to both eliminate uncertainty but also to exploit uncertainty. I'll tell you an interesting story. It's not in the article, but I once asked Henry Kissinger, what was the most interesting intellectual or policy exercise or workshop or conference and symposia he ever participated in? And he sort of fought, no one ever asked him this, which is kind of interesting. Kissinger had participated in all of them. You name it. And he said, I actually think it's the Harvard MIT Arms Control working group that shelling set up. And as I make clear in the article, the two pieces that are in contradiction with each other, strategy of conflict and strategy in arms control, are written at the same time. And are the ones that are at odds with each other. And when I asked Henry why this was so influential, he said, well, you know, he had this extraordinarily smart interdisciplinary group. You had physicists, nuclear engineers, biochemists, economists, historians, political scientists. And they were all really grappling with this incredibly difficult question. So the good news story is I think shelling was able to bring together this incredible group to command this audience of fairly high egos and get them to work together in 1960 and 1961 to really grapple and wrestle with this question. And then additionally to have some policy influence, right? This was, you know, shelling was also doing a lot of work for the government. So the good news story is here's this honest, extraordinary effort to wrestle with a really hard question in which she and she correctly point out there's a lot of tensions and contradictions in and then trying to work through. And they produce these two books, one co-authored with Mord Halper and who talks about how you have to accept mutual vulnerability and build limitations, the other which says how do you exploit, you know, the fears and uncertainty. And so that leads to the second point, which is the policy influence. And this is something, right, near point about history. I remember confronting this document, which is in the Foreign Relations United States series at some point and just being really struck by it. And it's a document I sort of lead off with. It's a summer of 1961. Kennedy is actually up at high antisport. And we know from looking at the document that he read it, he marked it up and Bundy sends it up. And it's right in the summer of 61 where things are really heating up over Berlin. The president has just had a disastrous conference with Khrushchev. Kennedy has convinced that the crisis is coming to a head that it may be a military crisis. And given that the crisis is going to be over Berlin, this is going to present real challenges. Because East Berlin was in East Germany, 100 miles in enemy territory. And the Soviet Union controlled how the crisis would unfold because it could shut down the city. It could like they had done in 1948 during the blockade. They could do all sorts of things to put pressure on. And the United States and NATO would have to respond. And so as they ran through these scenarios and they had a series of exercises they called the Live Oak exercise, one of the ideas was, okay, East Berlin's cut off will send a division up the Autobahn, an American division to relieve them. Well, what would happen then if the Soviets, the East Germans destroyed that division? And as they work through the scenarios, they came to the conclusion that nuclear weapons would have to be used fairly quickly. And then the question becomes, how do you use nuclear weapons? And this is something President Kennedy thought about a lot. And Kennedy realized that if you were going to use one nuclear weapon, the pressure to use a lot of them was going to be there because there were such advantages to going first. And so he was kind of really wrestling that summer with how to think about that, how, if the actual fight came, how would these weapons be deployed? So Shelley produces this memo which he reads and it's a very odd memo. It essentially says, you're not going to launch a preemptive nuclear war for this because that would be crazy. Although, back, you know, a note on the side, they did look into that and I can talk to that you about that a little bit. They're not very useful on the battlefield. So what you should do is use it as a signal to signal resolve because one of the sort of insights that shelling had was that in these kind of battles of wills, the ability to signal resolve are really important. So more or less, he was saying, like just lob a nuclear device somewhere in Soviet territory, not for military advantage, not to necessarily kill anybody, but to tell the Soviets you were serious. I'm reading that document. I'm thinking, if I'm Kennedy sitting in the summer of 1961, I'm thinking, so you're telling me, we have this terrible crisis. And what you're asking me to do is to lob a random nuclear weapon into enemy territory. And that's what you're advising me. And of course, there's a follow-up memo from Paul Knitz. He calls it a mugs game. It's like, first of all, why do you think the Russians are going to think this is signaling? They're going to think it's a full-scale attack. And then they're going to launch everything at you. And you would have lost the advantage of a first strike and you would have a nuclear war. And so there was this tension for me here between the brilliance of shelling and this ability to pull together this extraordinary group to think through these things. And this advice that was listened to on the most important issue in one of our most dangerous periods by a President of the United States of Reddit. And I had to imagine Kennedy thought, this is really nuts. Like this is actually really nuts. Like this is beyond not helpful. And that was the first time I thought, okay, there might be a problem here with how shelling went about these things. So the good news is I give him credit for kind of wrestling with these hard dilemmas of which, to be honest, there is no answer. I don't think he actually kind of whether he was aware that he had these contradictions or not is not always entirely clear to me. But then when he tried to convert it to policy advice, I think it was less than helpful. But I would just sort of end that little kind of rant with the idea that I think shelling's key intellectual blinders or flaws, which was shared by a lot of the security studies people, not Brody, but many of the others, where they thought this military technology was so overwhelming that it shaped and made clear what all the outcomes would be. And they sort of forgot about the politics part of it. And when you're a politician, a leader, no matter what these weapons still are tools of strategy and statecraft. And you even see this, I talk a little bit this in the article about how shelling understood and many of the security studies people and even sometimes to this day understand what caused the First World War. As if these autonomous factors that were created by the qualities of the military technology mattered more than the politics itself, because I don't think shelling had a very good sense of the politics of the issues involved. There's a long-winded way of saying there's good and bad in it. Certainly the case. I know I love using shelling when I teach, because there were a lot of dichotomies in his ideas and a lot of tension. But one of the things I love, I always advocate that if you want to talk to a politician or to a military leader, that you need to speak the language of risk. And that's something I thought shelling has always done very, very well. You talk about in the article that he didn't believe necessarily that the purpose of nuclear weapons was destruction, but it was to pose risk to the enemy and force these discussions on how much risk was acceptable. I was wondering if we could dig into that just a little bit more deeply and why that could be stabilizing or destabilizing. Yeah, that's another really great point, Ryan. And I think that this is another one of those where you put yourself in the position of a leader. We all know for those of us who've studied this, the kind of great, vetted images that shelling would use about driving a car and pulling the steering wheel out and throwing it out or the game of chicken, all the things that imply that when you're in some competition of risk taking. when you're trying to manipulate risk, when there's this competition that you want to sort of seek advantages in that. And my sense was as a presidential historian that this is not really something president's seek, right? The idea that you're going to enter a crisis and take the steering wheel out and throw it out the window is not a policy-aption most presidents look for. And the one exception to this was Richard Nixon, who had, even though I doubt he himself read showing that a lot of what he had deserved, particularly in how Krushchev had behaved during Suez and the Berlin crisis, he thought that there were some advantage to be kind of seen as irresponsible. And you look at several points in the Nixon administration, he's the only president I can find who's really willing to engage in this kind of rest taking. And even he would back off in the end, and there's all these stories, say during the 73 Middle East war where we go to a nuclear alert with the idea of signaling something might happen that we're willing to manipulate risk. And you look at the Soviet records, and they didn't even pick up the message, they didn't really understand it. I think that analogizing complex, consequential and with nuclear weapons, potentially catastrophic interactions between great powers as if you're playing a game of chicken really doesn't capture how things actually work. And I think this is, again, comes to some of the misunderstandings of what shelling in his colleagues thought was actually going on in the origins of the First World War and in other sort of context. So I think most statesmen recognize risk is there, and they balance between trying to find advantages in it, but also trying to remove it. But when I think it comes to thermonuclear weapons, most presidents, fortunately, even our current president, recognize the gravity, and this is not something that you want to play games of chicken with. And again, I don't think that is a kind of a core understanding of politics that I don't think shelling just didn't fully grasp, as if these are kind of economic transactions, game theoretic transactions. And I just don't think that really captures how leaders think about these things. So I find this just a fascinating paradox at the heart of the article, that this idea that strategic stability and nuclear coercion are sometimes in direct tension with each other. And I think that's a really good explanation of why policymakers sometimes try to pursue both at the same time, because they recognize the risk, they recognize the gravity of the risk, but they're also responsible for trying to find some advantage in a situation even when the risks are high and they take them very seriously. I think that's a fascinating point. I wanted to ask you maybe a little bit more about something you've mentioned a couple times now, which is that shelling is drawing on what you see and those around him are drawing on a flawed understanding of history. And in some cases, maybe taking the wrong lessons. So ideas about surprise attack, arms races, inadvertent stumbling into war, you've mentioned the first world war a couple of times. We're based on a really simplified or just mistaken reading of that history. So can you talk a little bit more about a, if the stakes are this high and they had all these smart people, why wasn't the history better? That's my first question. And b, then how did unpack for the readers? The article does a great job of this. How some of these flawed readings of important critical historical episodes shaped the development of strategic stability and these debates that the article walks through when that shelling was working on? So that's a really good insight. And I think to capture it, one has to kind of go back to the mindset, the world of the late 1950s. And early 1960s, when there's still this memory of the Second World War. And there's this idea of the two crucial events of the Second World War are considered surprise attacks. First, Stalin's attack on Russia, an Operation Barbarossa, and then of course the one Americans were very painfully aware of, which was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. And so the first idea that these were surprise attacks was kind of conventional cultural belief, right? And of course, when FDR announces it, when everyone thinks about it, and certainly the American imagination, it is seen as this dastardly bolt from the blue. Of course, as you go through the historical record, and you know this, Shina, because this is an area that you would be familiar with, there was while the attack on Pearl Harbor itself was a surprise, the idea that Japan was basically after months and months and months of the US sort of tightening the news economically and diplomatically in Japan with an understanding that the result was not unlikely to be aggression is clear. And you can understand why FDR and a lot of people didn't want anyone to know that, and it's not that there's some conspiratorial thing that FDR knew Pearl Harbor was coming. It's more that the United States had come to the conclusion by the summer of 1941 that Japan's aggression was unacceptable and that it had a really kind of push it back. And it had extraordinary economic leverage over it, Japan tried to negotiate, and the United States' diplomatic position to Japan was humiliating, right? And we know this now, it's not really controversial. So the idea that it's a surprise attack that somehow one day Japan got up and decided to do this and the United States had no idea this was going to happen was commonly thought, but was sort of a perversion of the reality. And it's similar to Barbarossa, right? Like you can't organize and attack that dig without months and months and months of preparation and Stalin just ignored all the evidence he saw. Richard Nettleboe had a great book decades ago about the cognitive dissonance that leaders often go through when they see evidence of a disaster. So the whole notion of surprise attack, remember in the late 50s, that's what everyone was worried about. They're worried about it take a surprise attack, you add an authoritarian country and you add nuclear weapons and the great fear was one day you're going to wake up and the Soviet Union is going to launch a bolt from the blue. And it seems kind of crazy to us now, but you can imagine sort of in looking backwards where if people assumed that the Second World War was begun by these authoritarian states just ruthlessly attacking without warning that such a thing could happen again. And that kind of, shelling didn't really kind of dig deep to explore whether that happened. And when you actually ask yourself, depending on how you define a surprise attack, how many surprise attacks have there been in history, right? How many like major surprise attacks? It's not very, very common. And then you get to things like accidental war, inadvertent escalation. And during the early 60s, Barbara Tuckman wrote this tremendous book, The Guns of August, which is a beautifully written history of how the First World War happened. It's argument is essentially this was a war that happened that nobody wanted and that there were forces external to the political process. And AJP Taylor also contributed to this too. The notion that military timetables led to or that sort of almost by accident a war can happen or could spiral out of control had no one has any control out of. And what's interesting to me is when you kind of go through, and there's an enormous historiography on the First World War and people disagree about, you know, a lot of the factors, but what's fairly clear is you can go and see point by point people make a decision and they know it might have this consequence, but it's it's a process, it's not an accident, right? And like everyone goes into it, they may have been to Ryan's earlier point about risk, they may have been playing bad bats and playing bad poker, but they knew what their hand was and they knew what their hope for outcome was. And so there's a hint of truth to all of these, there's a hint of truth to kind of escalated in ways people didn't hope for. It was not exactly totally a planned operation. The origins of the Second World War certainly were to some element surprising, but by shelling and his colleagues by focusing so much on factors that were outside of the political process, outside of what states and their leaders saw. And it created a way of understanding the world that almost ironically was apolitical and that if you could just understand the quality and characteristics of these weapons. Control them on one side. hand them, exploit them and others, you would be able to generate sort of outcomes that you wanted or avoid those you didn't. And it just was just a very odd way to me as a historian, as I was looking at how states made decisions that they would do this. Now, to shoot at your ex-in-question why didn't they sort of know better? It's a really good point. I think Americans, we do have a technological determinist side to us. This is true in a lot of our assessments of any number of questions. We see technology as the cause of and solution of life's major problems, as Homer Simpson once said about alcohol. And I also think it was at a time where the current fears, the sense of a bolt from the blue that could come where nobody wanted people went and they looked at the past sort of through those jaded colored lenses to find evidence that that's what they were going through today, even though it might have not been the most comprehensive analysis. Let me ask you, why do you think it matters today that that shelling was a lousy historian? Because you clearly tie that to these debates and the prime being a bit tongue-in-cheek here. But why does it matter for today's conversations about strategic stability that we get this history more accurate than shelling in his contemporaries did? Yeah, so I would say a couple things. One is that something that I think the American security studies community can definitely be accused of is they look through things through a very American lens, right? So they expected the nuclear behavior of other states to mirror what the behavior of the US Soviet competition was. And as you know, as China starts to increase its nuclear capabilities, the real interesting puzzle is why for so long they did so much less than they could have, and actually existed in a state really not even seeking mutual vulnerability until recently, right? So I think that understanding that the first question to ask about nuclear weapons is why does the state want them? What do they hope to achieve with them? And just to back up in the history a little bit, this is a little bit of obscure history, but it's history that really, really matters. If you look at why the United States developed the nuclear posture that it did during the Cold War, elements of which it still has, which actually was not about mutual vulnerability, it had to do with a very particular problem set, and that was how to defend Europe against overwhelming Soviet conventional forces. And you know, right after World War II, the United States policy was, well, we're not going to do it. We'll hope the Europeans rebuild themselves, we'll go home, we demobilize, Korean War happens, China goes communist, Soviets have an atomic device, there's a sense of emergency, Kenan's original grand strategy is thrown out the window, people say, what the heck do we do in this situation? And there's basically four options, right? The first option is actually what's Kenan's option, which is the Americans and Soviets go home and you tell Germany to reunify. Well, everyone said that's nuts, it looks like the interwar period and the Soviets are closer than the Americans, we don't want to do that. Second option, the Americans match the conventional capabilities of the Soviet Union, send 90 divisions to West Germany. Well, Eisenhower said that would create a garrison state, tax, highest differential tax rate in the US was actually 90% in the 1950s. So you would have been talking about a full mobilization of a peacetime economy that would have been politically desperately unpopular. It's the third option. Well, the French and the British were developing nuclear weapons, you let the West Germans have nuclear weapons. Well, that would survive your security problems, right? If the West Germans had nuclear weapons, you could go home, but the West Germans were a half-generation removed from the Vairnacht, nobody wanted the West Germans to have nuclear weapons, right? Not only that, they were a divided country, so they were essentially not interested in stability. They were revanchised by definition. And if you're the Soviet Union, you think about, you put down worker strikes in East Berlin in 1952, if in a situation where West Germany is nuclear weapons and you have a problem in East Germany, and the West Germans say, "Nope, you're not allowed to do that. We're going to use our nuclear weapons if you do." The whole Soviet grand strategy is threatened there. And so that's not an option because not only are the Soviets, the one thing they'll fight World War III over is to make sure the West Germans never get nuclear weapons. By the way, the British and French would fight World War III to make sure the West Germans don't get nuclear weapons. So that option's out. What's the one option you have left? You defend Western Germany, and since you're conventionally outgunned, you have to use nuclear weapons. Okay. Well, where do you use them? You want the West Germans to be involved in the support because you want them not to have nuclear weapons, but to provide conventional forces. And you want them to be on your side, not the Soviet side. So the West Germans say, "Okay, you're going to defend us. You're not going to drop the nuclear weapons on West Germany, are you?" Right? Because that's not a great deal. If you tell them we're going to use those weapons the minute you cross the border, which the French would have been happy with, the West Germans are going to say, "So you're going to incinerate us?" So the only strategy for political reasons that made sense was preemption. So if you want to keep the West Germans on board, you had to hit Soviet and Warsaw Pax forces as they were mobilizing, which meant you needed tons of counter-force. You needed to basically launch on warning capabilities. You needed to pre-delegate authority. You needed to create that absolutely crazy nuclear complex you see and docks are strange love. And the reason it matters is when you're, you know, you all we've all talked to Dr. Strange love in classes and the lessons that our students get from it is that the military is crazy and that these bureaucratic political reasons for this to happen. The origins of that strategy, when Curtis Lemme, who was crazy, was asked to carry, it wasn't his strategy. They said, "Here's the political goal we have to achieve. West Germany can have nuclear weapons. We have to keep them in the Western Alliance." Right? We can't start World War Three, nor can we bankrupt the country by going to full-on Sparta like military. This is the only option that they really had. And that weird and it's very a historical and it's just like I point out in the article that defending East Berlin is very weird and a historical. People like Shelling looked at that or they looked at the Berlin stuff which was very strange and so e-genreous and came up with a whole variety of laws for how nuclear weapons were supposed to work everywhere around the world. And strategic stability and coercion, all that stuff emerges from that. By going back and actually understanding the history, you can then go back and say, "Okay, we're in 2026. How much of this applies today?" You know, start just ended, you know, a few weeks ago. My friends, some of our friends, Shina, who are in the arms control world are just like, "This is the end of the world." Right? Is it? And this gets to another point I make in the article. There's always been this tension between whether mutual vulnerability is a natural phenomena that occurs and you don't need any help because of the nature of the weapons or whether you need political treaties to do it. I mean, why should there be arms control treaties between two countries that are essentially a war with each other? Or at least in some level of conflict. But in our arms control world, we think, "Well, you had a lot of people saying, "Well, we're supporting Ukraine as they kill lots of Russians, but let's please keep the start treaty going." Well, there's a sort of a strangeness to this that kind of fundamentally misunderstands how international politics works. So, I think that's one of the reasons why I think people have to understand this because this are going into the world today and trying to understand where they are because most people, as you know, are going to, when they're going to learn about international politics, are going to spend a lot of time reading Thomas Shawling. You're going to spend a lot of time thinking about these issues. Where did those concepts come from? What was the world they were developed in? And are they applicable to the world that they face today? And that's sort of kind of why I think it matters. This article you wrote appears in volume 9 issue 2 of the Texas National Security Review, which is a special addition devoted to strategic stability and emerging technologies. And you've talked a lot about Shawling and his deficiencies in understanding politics, but you point out in the article that often war is driven more by political decisions than military technology or posture, but stability theory tends to invert that logic a little bit. What gets lost when we look at technologies, the primary driver of war in peace instead of these politics? Yeah, I mean, we're correct. The reason this was all put together, I was kind of the old timey historian asked to talk about nuclear stuff. But of course, we're in an era right now and we've published some great stuff on this where we're seeing this extraordinary emergence of powerful technologies whose consequences we don't fully understand. We don't fully understand necessarily how they affect the battlefield. And you see this really going on in the war in Ukraine where every day whether it's unmanned vehicles, whether to artificial intelligence, probably at some point we're going to have robotics involved, changes the nature of the battlefield. But then the question becomes, do these new technologies create destabilizing characteristics that could actually generate dangers and fears and crises that you wouldn't want otherwise, which was always the argument about nuclear weapons. Actually, you can flip that on its head. One of the things that emerged from both the Soviets and the Americans recognizing how catastrophic nuclear use would be was that they had a shared interest. This is where I think shelling and his talk about strategic stability did actually matter. There was a recognition that these technologies generate a shared interest between potential adversaries because there wasn't really an outcome where a war using these technologies would make any sense from a political perspective. When you look at it and shelling, of course, and talking about strategy and arms control and talking about mutual vulnerability helped create that intellectual architecture for the Soviets and Americans who agreed to limit the strategic forces. There's another one, and this is both highlights the tensions and contradictions. The United States and the Soviet Union also realized that there was an incentive not just to limit the competition between them, but the limit who else got these nuclear weapons. Of course, you get the nuclear non-properation treaty. As I highlight in the article, those goals are intention. The things you want for strategic stability are often at odds things you want for proliferation stability. The thing about politics is that's how you manage those contradictions and those tensions. The United States signed the nuclear non-properation treaty. One of the things whenever you go to global arms control treaties, they're always going on about how the United States and the Soviet Union don't do their article six agreements, which is to reduce the global forces, to eliminate them. They never had any intention of it. They have reduced them, but the whole idea was how do we manage this really terrible contradiction between the fact that we want to limit the competition between us and the--we don't use these weapons. While recognizing we also want to limit proliferation, which weirdly, by the way, the Soviets and the Americans shared an interest in. Neither the Americans nor the Soviets wanted other states to develop nuclear weapons. That brings us to today, which is you've got two bitter rivals between the China and the United States who have serious geopolitical, economic, even ideological competition. But a recognition that they also--these technological forces are such that they can generate--they have a shared interest both in making sure that that technology does not generate unneeded or unwanted or problematic tensions between them, but also a shared interest in making sure that that technology defuses that some third party doesn't create some sort of issue or problem. And I often wonder if--because the level of tension, ideological and geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union in the mid and late '60s, when they first started talking about both non-proliferation, cooperation, and strategic arms treaties was far higher than it is between the US and China. I know people like to argue with me, but this doesn't even compare, right? And yet they found a way to recognize that they both had a political interest in doing something about this. I think emerging technology potentially is a similar situation with the United States and China. You're not going to resolve the disputed Taiwan issue, South and East China see macroeconomic policy, but on this sort of more narrow, but consequential issue of emerging technology. Not just artificial intelligence, but you think of something in biotechnology. There's a lot of crazy stuff when you marry biotechnology with artificial intelligence that can be unbelievably transformative and also life-planet-endingly terrifying, right? And you think that there's probably possibilities for these two rivals/adversaries to find common interest in coming up with agreements on them. Let me ask you about how we think about and kind of pull all these threads together when we look at the global environment today, because like you said, we're in the middle of a debate about superpower strategic stability with the expiration of new start. We're thinking about these questions about whether new countries are going to acquire nuclear weapons and whether the great powers, despite geopolitical competition, have an interest in limiting proliferation, creating more proliferation stability. And then we also have this whole set of emerging technologies, which you just alluded to talking about about biotech. We have an article in this special issue on AI and a whole range of emerging technologies, AI cyber, autonomous systems that are arguably raising new questions or new applied questions about the nature of technology and warfare. And so strategic stability is coming back up as a guiding framework. So I guess I wanted to ask you to close us out. What do you think based on your study of this history, people who are looking at these emerging technologies should be most wary of, most careful about, and if that's the wrong paradigm, what do you think should replace it? In other words, what are the kind of takeaway lessons to guide policymakers as they navigate this new technological and geopolitical moment? Great question. And I put it very simply not to let the technology itself shape the conversation, but to recognize that underneath any technological development, no matter how powerful, no matter how transformative, that ultimately states when they engage with each other, have sets of interests that are either coincide or in conflict, and the issues that led after the Berlin and Kube and Missile Crisis to the Americans and the Soviets finally getting together to talk about both their own nuclear competition and limiting proliferation. There was a recognition of the technology, but it was recognizing and resolving some of the underlying political disputes. And when those underlying political disputes were not resolved, at least acknowledging they were there and putting them on ice. So it was when you put politics first, regardless of what the technologies capabilities are, these states are driven by their interests, their fears, their concerns, and their worries. So any engagement, while we should understand the technologies and their change, before we ask any question, ask the political question, is what is it that states want, and what are they trying to do, or what are they fear about these technologies? That's a great parting lesson for us all to think of. I'm going to go away and think about that for a while, Frank. Thank you. Excellent. This has been a fascinating discussion. We could clearly keep talking about these issues for a while more. Frank, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Shina. Thank you Ryan. This was so much fun. Thank you for joining us for Horns of a Dilemma, the podcast of the Texas National Security Review. Our guest today has been Frank Gavin, author of many books, chair of the editorial board of the Texas National Security Review, and most importantly for today, author of the article Strategic Stability and Its Limits, Reflections on Shelling, which is always can be accessed on our website TNSR.org. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen. You can always find more of our work provided for free at our website TNSR.org. Today's episode was produced by TNSR Digital and Technical Manager Jordan Morning and made possible by the University of Texas System. This is Shina Chesnet-Gritens and Ryan Best. Thanks for listening.