Ceci N’Est Pas Une Nuke? The Impact of Emerging Militarized Technologies on Strategic Stability

Amy Nelson wrote for the Journal of Strategic Studies on emerging military technologies, and their effects on defense and strategic stability.

Novel technologies with military applications are often implicitly viewed as significant threats to strategic stability. Yet, some implementations of emerging technologies may bolster defenses, mitigate the security dilemma, or both. In particular, this is more likely to happen if diffusion of the technology is combined with arms control that focuses on qualities rather than quantities of weapons. In this paper, we focus on four emerging militarized technologies (cyber weapons, hypersonic glide vehicles, armed drones, and lethal autonomous weapons systems) and evaluate their effects on the relative advantage of the defense and distinguishability, finding that all four have the potential to contribute to strategic stability.