Alliances and Nuclear Risk: Evidence from the Cold War, Implications for Today

Our project seeks to understand whether, when, and how great power alliance commitments to weaker states can lead to peacetime military policies that pose heightened risks of wartime escalation—particularly nuclear escalation. The research we will present explores the case of NATO's 1979 "Dual Track" decision, which deployed hundreds of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and was uniformly interpreted as highly escalatory. The extant literature on alliances can explain neither why the United States and its European allies disagreed about this policy, nor why the more powerful United States acceded to the preferences of its weaker European partners to deploy the missiles. Using recently released primary documents from the Carter administration, we carefully reconstruct U.S. decision-making, using the case to inductively generate a proto-theory of alliances and military escalation. We hypothesize that differential exposure to the costs of war can give alliance partners different preferences for escalation risk, and that concerns about alliance cohesion can increase the bargaining leverage of weaker states, leading to the adoption of more escalatory military policies than the great power prefers. This proto-theory can be refined and tested in future work, and has a number of potential implications for alliance management and military policy related to present American commitments in Europe and Asia.

Caitlin Talmadge is associate professor of Security Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, as well as senior non-resident fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. Professor Talmadge's research and teaching focus on defense policy, civil-military relations, U.S. military operations and strategy, deterrence and escalation, and security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. She is author of the award-winning book, The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell, 2015), and co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy (Routledge, 2021), now in its fourth edition.

Brendan Green is associate professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati. He studies grand strategy, military behavior, nuclear strategy, and U.S. foreign policy. Brendan's most recent writing is on the dynamics of nuclear weapons and arms races during the Cold War and today, especially in his book The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). He has been published at The Journal of Strategic Studies, Security Studies, International Security, and other outlets for international affairs research and commentary. Mr. Green has given international talks and workshops on his research in South Korea, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Norway, France, and the United States.