The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
Some nuclear armed states, including the United States, have built and maintain arsenals that include nuclear weapons with yields of 10 kilotons or less (comparable to the US bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as well as much higher yield weapons (100s of kilotons) with a view that the lower yield weapons may serve an early or first-use role in an escalating crisis or conventional conflict by initiating nuclear war while hoping that it can remain limited. This presentation provides scenario-based public opinion survey data gathered in 2023 from the United States, Britain, Pakistan, and India, to assess if the availability of lower yield nuclear weapons shape public views on nuclear weapons use and non-use. The scenarios include war between India and Pakistan, and between the U.S., U.K. and Russia that begins in the Baltics. It asks how in an escalating crisis, these publics choose between the use of conventional weapons, lower-yield nuclear weapons and higher yield nuclear weapons which carry concerns about much more extensive and uncontrollable effects, and why they made any particular choice. The results highlight how public belief and perceptions complicate current understandings of how in a conflict publics may see the threshold for escalating conventional war to nuclear war.
About the speaker: Lisa Langdon Koch is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. Her book, Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (2023), received the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award from the International Security section of the American Political Science Association. She teaches courses on international politics, US foreign policy, US national security policy, and the international politics of nuclear weapons, and has published on nuclear proliferation, nuclear restraint, and foreign policy. She has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.