Conclusion

The goal of this project was to explore and challenge expectations of future nuclear dangers and the factors that might shape them. The scenario-generation exercise was designed to encourage participants and the broader security community to think beyond the crises of today, to consider the implications of key uncertainties, and to reflect on the range of futures for which American policymakers should prepare.

A post-workshop survey found that most participants considered the exercise useful (median response of “4” on a 5-point scale), but determining what elements or outcomes were most useful was difficult. When asked directly, few participants reported changing their opinions on the future of nuclear dangers. However, the answers to more obliquely phrased questions—e.g., “What did you find most surprising?”—indicated that many had a more nuanced experience. One participant who reported little change also noted, “We considered ideas I had never brought to mind,” suggesting the exercise did address, to some extent, the cognitive limits that Schelling identified decades earlier, when he wrote that no one can make a list of things they haven’t thought of.¹

Schelling made this point to highlight the usefulness of wargames, which were another of Kahn’s “strange aids to thought.” To Kahn, the dynamic interaction of games could counteract the limits of analysis and imagination if, as he wrote, a player emerged from a game saying, “It never occurred to me that the response to X could or would be Y.”² Like scenarios, games are not predictive, and they are not usually intended as replicable scientific exercises. Their value often comes from the very fact that they are not replicable because the diversity of game outcomes demonstrates variance in potential real-world outcomes. Just as scenarios demonstrate that there is no single plausible future, games demonstrate that there is no single plausible outcome of a conflict.³ Contra the rationalist model of deterrence that has often dominated, the character of the players matters, as do the particular dynamics between them.

This is one reason an increasing number of scholars have turned to games and scenarios to study nuclear conflict. Recent scenario exercises have addressed challenges to extended deterrence (Center for Strategic and International Studies), the future of Iran’s nuclear program (Center for a New American Security), the contours of the new nuclear age (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments), and the prospects for nuclear abolition (N Square).⁴ Recent studies of nuclear wargames include efforts by Brown University’s Reid Pauly, who demonstrated that deterrence is hardly the only dynamic that explains nearly 80 years of nuclear restraint. Stacie Pettyjohn and Hannah Dennis of the Center for a New American Security ran a game exploring Chinese nuclear use in a potential conflict over Taiwan.⁵ And Pauly, along with scholars Erik Lin-Greenberg and Jacquelyn Schneider, have called for greater use of wargaming in international relations research generally.⁶

This exercise provides a data point in this growing constellation of efforts to think differently about nuclear weapons. Whereas most recent scholarly work draws on archival research or qualitative and quantitative social-scientific tools to generate knowledge, these efforts draw on the ersatz experience of imagined futures. Given the lack of actual experience in nuclear matters—one that we must hope will continue—we should make greater use of strange aids to explore the future of nuclear dangers. Our policies are only good to the extent that they reflect reality, and our understanding of reality must continually evolve as the operating environment changes. Scenarios (and games) provide a way to routinely challenge our assumptions—if we institutionalize the use of imagination in national security. That is the way to undermine the hegemony of the hedgehog and address the uncertainty of the unthinkable.