Acknowledgments

The project on Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age focuses on the dangers and opportunities presented by an increasing complex world shaped by nine states that possess nuclear weapons. The initiative is concentrating its efforts in three areas: 1) a rapidly shifting geopolitical environment and its impact on relations between and among the states that now make up a multipolar nuclear world; 2) the technological frontiers being crossed in cyber, nonnuclear strategic weaponry, space, bioweapons, and enhanced missile defense and their implications for strategic stability, nuclear norms, and nuclear concepts, such as extended nuclear deterrence; and 3) in managing this new nuclear world, the role and prospects of nuclear arms control as well as alternative mechanisms for governing and reducing the prospects for nuclear use. In the first phase of the project, we have focused on some of the core questions generated by the changes in this new environment.

This second publication, Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: Emerging Risks and Declining Norms in the Age of Technological Innovation and Changing Nuclear Doctrines, examines two specific features that have come to characterize the current nuclear order: fast-paced technological innovation in nuclear and nonnuclear weapons and rapidly deteriorating nuclear norms.

We are extremely grateful to Jane Vaynman for providing a deeply analytical introduction to this publication and to Nina Tannenwald and James Acton for sharing their knowledge and expertise in their fine essays. We also want to acknowledge the extraordinary commitment, talent, and expertise of the members of the project’s working group.

Funding for Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age initiative has been provided by generous support from Louise Henry Bryson and John E. Bryson, John F. Cogan, Jr., Alan M. Dachs, Bob and Kristine Higgins, Kenneth L. and Susan S. Wallach, and Lester Crown.

Robert Legvold and Christopher Chyba
Co-Chairs, Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age project,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences