October 17, 2025
The Program on Science and Global Security (SGS) is pleased to report the award of a new two-year $500,000 grant by Carnegie Corporation of New York. This investment will support SGS in advancing a science-based assessment of the impact of emerging technologies for nuclear weapon risks and enabling new global policy interest and cooperation on nuclear arms restraints, reductions, and disarmament. SGS has received funding from the Carnegie Corporation since the 1980s.
The United States, Russia, and China are engaged in a race to develop new technologies that carry significant global security implications, including artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and sensors with continuous global coverage. The US also is pursuing new offensive capabilities as part of the Golden Dome missile defense program. Combined, these emerging technologies could fuel perceptions that it is possible to threaten attacks on deployed nuclear delivery systems anywhere and at any time. This could lead to even riskier nuclear postures and increase the likelihood of nuclear war.
Building on insights from a 2023 scoping workshop organized by SGS, this grant will allow the Program to carry out independent analysis to explore and open up widely shared presumptions about the foreseeable technological future that are the basis for current national and multilateral debates on the impact of emerging technologies for nuclear risks. The findings could help balance the technological determinism and over-promising, corporate and military interests, and strategic concerns about dominance, vulnerability and parity driving parts of the emerging technology and nuclear risks policy debate.
The project also will assess current global governance challenges for emerging technologies and their implication for nuclear arms control and disarmament and identify possible new problems and solutions. The goal is to enable more informed and balanced international nuclear policy debates that may allow for considerations of options more oriented towards arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament to reduce and end nuclear weapon threats.
To conduct this research and inform the global policy debate on the impact of emerging technologies on nuclear risks, SGS has assembled an international technical and policy team. It includes experts from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Hamburg, the American Astronomical Society, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs among others.