Owen Cote

Owen Cote (1960-2024)

Principal Research Scientist

Associate Director, MIT Security Studies Program

E40-489

617-258-7428

Biography

Owen R. Coté, Jr. joined the MIT Security Studies Program in 1997 as Associate Director. Prior to that he was Assistant Director of the International Security Program at Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs, where he remains co-editor of the Center's journal, International Security. He received his Ph.D. from MIT, where he specialized in U.S. defense policy and international security affairs. He is the author of The Third Battle: Innovation in the U.S. Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Submarines, a book analyzing the sources of the U.S. Navy's success in its Cold War antisubmarine warfare effort, and a co-author of Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material. He has written on the sources of innovation in military doctrine, the future of war, nuclear and conventional force structure issues, and the threat of nuclear terrorism.

CV

Teaching

  • 17.480
    Understanding Modern Military Operations

Selected Publications

Owen R. Cote, Jr., “One if by invasion, two if by coercion: US military capacity to protect Taiwan from China,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 12, 2022

Owen R. Cote, Jr., “Taiwan's submarine-building plan,” Strategic Comments Vol. 27, No. 1 (2021)

Owen R. Cote, Jr., “Invisible nuclear-armed submarines, or transparent oceans? Are ballistic missile submarines still the best deterrent for the United States?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Vol. 75, No. 1 (2019)

Owen R. Cote, Jr., “Assessing the Undersea Balance Between the U.S. and China,” in Thomas G. Mahnken, ed., Developing Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century: Theory, History and Practice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012)

Owen R. Cote Jr. (ed), Do Democracies Win Their Wars? (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. University Press, 2011) (With Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds))

Owen R. Cote Jr. (ed), Contending With Terrorism: Roots, Strategies, and Responses (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. University Press, 2010) (With Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds))

Owen R. Cote Jr. (ed), Going Nuclear: Nuclear Proliferation and International Security in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. University Press, 2010) (With Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds.))

Owen R. Cote Jr. (ed), Primacy and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. University Press, 2009) (With Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds))

Owen R. Cote Jr., “An Agenda for Submarine Force Experimentation,” The Submarine Review, April 2009, pp. 31-38

Owen R. Cote, Jr. (ed), New Global Dangers: Changing Dimensions of International Security (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. University Press, 2004) (With Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds))

Owen R. Cote, Jr. (ed), Offense, Defense, and War (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. University Press, 2004) (With Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds))

Owen R. Cote, Jr., “The Personnel Needs of the Future Force,” in Cindy Williams, ed., Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Press, 2003), pp. 55-68

Owen R. Cote, Jr., “The Look of the Battlefield,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, Vol. 159, No. 24 (December 2003), pp. 72-73

Owen R. Cote, Jr., “Weapons of Mass Confusion,” Boston Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 9 (April/May 2003) pp. 26-27

Owen R. Cote, Jr., “The New War Machines,” Technology Review, March 2003

For a complete list of publications

Books

  • The Third Battle

    The Third Battle: Innovation in the U.S. Navy's Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Submarines

    Owen Cote

    Naval War College, Newport, RI, 2003

    In The Third Battle, by Owen Cote, a manuscript developed under the editorial leadership of Dr. Thomas B. Grassey, then Press editor, Dr. Cote argues that the U.S. Navy’s innovative response to the Soviet submarine fleet during the Cold War represents the third great battle for control of the seas in the 20th century. Technology was always the key factor in the continuing seesaw peacetime race between the two superpowers. Dr. Cote, Associate Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, provides a critical groundbreaking perspective on this battle—quite different from the two that preceded it. During the two world wars, the then new and revolutionary submarine threatened the ability of the major naval powers to gain decisive control of the sea. In peacetime, the Allied powers were unable, or perhaps ultimately basically reluctant, to prepare innovative and effective measures to counter submarine use. In war, they then faced unrestricted submarine warfare and the attending significant losses. Those antisubmarine measures that were eventually developed were short-lived because of the close technological arms race between the combatants. It was only with the development in the mid-1980s of truly quiet Soviet nuclear submarines that the U.S. Navy decisively confronted the antisubmarine warfare challenge. Cote details the events leading to that point and presents a critical study of technological innovation with clear implications for challenges in the 21st century.

  • Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy

    Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material

    Owen Cote, Graham Allison, Richard Falkenrath, and Steven E. Miller

    MIT Press, 1996

    What if the bomb that exploded in Oklahoma City or New York's World Trade Center had used 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium? The destruction would have been far more vast. This danger is not so remote: the recipe for making such a bomb is simple, and soon the ingredients might be easily attained. Thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from the weapons complex of the former Soviet Union, poorly guarded and poorly accounted for, could soon leak on to a vast emerging nuclear black market.

    This study by Graham Allison and three colleagues at Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs warns that containing the leakage of nuclear materials--and keeping them out of the hands of groups hostile to the United States--is our nation's highest security priority.

    As the most open society on a shrinking planet, the United States has no reliable defense against smuggled weapons fashioned from black-market materials by a determined state or terrorist group. Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy highlights the fact that the only way to combat the threat is by preventing nuclear leakage in the first place. Its message is both timely and urgent: it outlines the new nuclear danger and details how to reshape U.S. national security policy to deal with these dangers.

  • Implications of the Dissolution of the Soviet Union for Accidental/Inadvertent Uses of Weapons of Mass Destruction

    Owen R. Cote Jr.

    New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 (With Steven E. Miller and Ashton Carter)

Media

Quoted in "Taiwan's planned submarine fleet cound forestall a potential Chinese invasion for decades," CNN.com, December 20, 2020.

Quoted in "Taiwan is Building Eight New Submarines--They Alone Could Destroy A Chinese Invasion Fleet," Forbes.com, December 2, 2020.

Quoted in "Confusion as Russia denies US claim of breakthrough in nuclear arms talks," The Telegraph, October 14, 2020.

Quoted in "The Russian Navy: A Submarine Powerhouse?" The National Interest, September 6, 2019.

Quoted in "Some experts question defense value of submarines," thehour.com, June 16, 2018.

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