June 16, 2023
The Princeton Program on Science and Global Security organized a two-day workshop and convened a group of scientists, technology experts, scholars, and policy specialists to assess the implications of emerging technologies on the futures of nuclear weapon policies in the United States, Russia, and China.
The United States, Russia, and China are engaged in a race to develop new technologies that carry significant military and global security implications. Advances in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, sensors with continuous global coverage, along with hypersonic and maneuverable weapon systems, are rapidly being integrated into military structures and capabilities. Key goals are to accelerate the tempo of warfare by reducing the time to detect, target, and destroy military objectives, to expand to a global scale the space for such actions, and to conduct them with increased precision. This arms race is reinforced by elite and expert discourses characterized by over-promising, parity-seeking, and fears of falling behind. There are grounds, however, for skepticism and uncertainty in whether these technologies can yield a new revolution in military affairs within the foreseeable future.
The introduction and weaponization of emerging technologies pose significant challenges to the existing concepts and structures of arms control, as control regimes devised to constrain earlier generations of weaponry may not prove effective in regulating weapons equipped with these new technologies. Therefore, arms control advocates and international policymakers will have to consider which elements of the existing control architecture can be extended or adapted and determine what new mechanisms will have to be devised for this purpose.
The aim of the workshop was to better understand the compounding factors and risks associated with the rapid development, militarization, and deployment of emerging technologies, including the scientific and technical basis for any claims of potential transformative impacts, as well as possible arms control measures and other restraint options.
The workshop was organized by Sebastien Philippe, Igor Moric, Zia Mian and Geralyn McDermott, with inputs from the SGS Emerging Technologies Working Group.