Nuclear Strategy

My research on nuclear strategy uses contemporary U.S.-China nuclear dynamics to test and refine great power nuclear strategy developed during the Cold War. 

My most recent article, published in a 2025 special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies edited by Charles Glaser, uses China’s rapid increase in the pace of its nuclear modernization to test competing theories about the impact of nuclear weapons on international politics. Based on written Chinese sources, I find little evidence to suggest that China is pursuing a competitive nuclear posture akin to that of the superpowers during the Cold War, although a gap has appeared between the views of China’s nuclear experts and the capabilities it is building.

I am also working on a paper that examines China’s motivations for its nuclear modernization, based on the first set of interviews with Chinese experts about nuclear strategy since the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2015, I co-authored an article in International Security with Taylor Fravel, which found that China was not following the example of the Soviet Union by entering into a nuclear arms race as a consequence of its emerging geopolitical competition with the United States. In a second article published in International Security in 2019, we use Chinese views and behavior about nuclear escalation to re-visit Cold War theoretical debates over whether nuclear escalation can be controlled. Both of these papers draw on interviews with Chinese experts and original Chinese-language sources to better understand the views informing China's contemporary nuclear strategy.

I am also working on a paper that explains why China never developed tactical nuclear weapons, despite having strong strategic incentives to do so during the 1980s. That paper draws on authoritative new Chinese-language sources of top leaders' deliberations about tactical nuclear weapons.

Photo (above): posters promoting reforms of the Chinese military at the end of 2015.