Emerging Technologies and Strategic Stability in Peacetime, Crisis, and War | 2019 | Publications

Emerging Technologies and Strategic Stability in Peacetime, Crisis, and War

Caitlin Talmadge

Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 42, No. 6 (2019) (With Todd Sechser and Neil Narang)

Recent commentary has sounded the alarm about the effects of emerging technologies on strategic stability, yet the topic has received relatively little systematic scholarly attention. Will emerging technologies such as cyber, autonomous weapons, additive manufacturing, hypersonic vehicles, and remote sensing make the world more dangerous? Or is pessimism unwarranted? In this volume, we leverage international relations scholarship, historical data, and a variety of methodological approaches to discern the future implications of new technologies for international security. The findings suggest that new technologies can have multiple, conditional, and even contradictory effects on different aspects of strategic stability, and raise a host of important questions for future research.