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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Looking forward to talking about The Arms Control Paradox: Managing Uncertainty in an Insecure World @stanfordpress.bsky.social this evening, 8pm Eastern at @arizonastateuni.bsky.social. Register here: asu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It’s publication day for the Arms Control Paradox AND @newamerica.org’s Future Security Forum! Thrilled to have this out in the world. This has been a long time coming, years of work on a book about some of the world’s most dangerous weapons and what that history sayscan be done now.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Use code AMYJNELSON20 for 20% off www.sup.org/books/politi...

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

6/6 Those books taught me how to think about restraint under conditions that their authors could specify. Mine takes up the case where the capability itself is still shifting while the negotiation runs.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

5/6 @stanfordpress.bsky.social is where a lot of this field's spine sits. Coit Blacker and Gloria Duffy's International Arms Control got me started. Lawrence Wittner, T.V. Paul, Michael Krepon, and Rose Gottemoeller are on that same list.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

4/6 Uncertainty management is the alternative: agreements broad enough to cover weapons that do not exist yet, with reciprocal limits, bounded scope, and verification designed to tolerate residual uncertainty rather than eliminate it.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

3/6 That logic pushes negotiations toward narrow, short, countable agreements built for clean verification, which is also what makes them easy to outrun.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

2/6 A clarification for nuclear readers up front. The foil here is risk reduction in the decision-sciences sense, expected losses weighted by likelihood, minimizing exposure, which is a different animal from the field's term of art for hotlines and NRRCs.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

1/6 Broad arms control agreements get hardest to negotiate at exactly the point they would do the most work: when uncertainty about the other side is highest. That paradox is the subject of my book, out Sept. 15 from Stanford University Press.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

7/7 It is also the argument at the center of The Arms Control Paradox, out September 15 from @stanfordpress.bsky.social Stanford University Press. Read the feature in the September issue: www.armscontrol.org/aca/2333 If Beijing won't discuss numbers, which measure comes first?

armscontrol.org

Arms Control Association | The authoritative source on arms control since 1971.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

6/7 Clarify commitments and escalation thresholds, keep operational detail indeterminate. With Moscow that means holding deployed force levels steady informally. With Beijing it means risk reduction rather than parity. The piece sets out what to ask for, and in what order.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

5/7 Beyond Bilateral makes the case for splitting the work. Norms stay at the five-party table, where shared vocabulary and testing moratoria do get built. Limits and risk reduction move to parallel bilateral channels, under what I call disciplined ambiguity.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

4/7 A comprehensive settlement asks every party to resolve every open question before any of them gains anything, which is why that table produces vocabulary and no limits. Arms control has succeeded when it managed irreducible uncertainty and failed when it tried to eliminate it.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

3/7 Trump and Xi met in Beijing in May. Chinese negotiators declined to discuss their arsenal and the fact sheet covered North Korea instead. The five-party format already has a record: the P5 process has met since 2009 without producing a single limit on anyone's nuclear forces.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

2/7 After New START lapsed in February, the administration's answer was a five-party negotiation covering Russian and Chinese forces at once. Sun Xiaobo, China's disarmament chief, told the NPT Review Conference this spring that it shifts American responsibilities onto other states.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

1/7 Trump and Xi meet at the White House this month, and Beijing has already said it wants no part of Washington's proposed nuclear talks. My new feature in @armscontrolnow.bsky.social Arms Control Today, "Beyond Bilateral," argues that the refusal was predictable from the design of the proposal.

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Reposted by Amy J. Nelson

New America @newamerica.org · 04/09/2026

New America experts Peter Bergen and @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social will speak at this year's Future Security Forum on Sept. 15, and both are publishing new books this month. 📚 "All the Presidents' Wars" (9/8) 📚 "The Arms Control Paradox" (9/15) 🔗 RSVP: go.newamerica.org/fsf-9-11-annivers…

This image is a promotional poster for the "Future Security Forum" featuring a book titled "All the Presidents' Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America's War on Terror" by Peter Bergen. The logos of Arizona State University and New America are at the top. A portrait of Peter Bergen is to the right of the book cover. The event date is September 15, and it is labeled as hybrid.

This image is a promotional poster for the "Future Security Forum" event, featuring the book cover "The Arms Control Paradox: Managing Uncertainty in an Insecure World" by Amy J. Nelson. The event is associated with Arizona State University and New America. Nelson is pictured next to the book cover. The event is scheduled for September 15 and will be held in a hybrid format.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Some of the best texts I've gotten all year: friends and family sending selfies with their copies of The Arms Control Paradox from @stanfordpress.bsky.social! Out Sept 15 from Stanford UP. Pre-order with code AMYJNELSON20 for 20% off: www.sup.org/books/politi...

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

3/ Which is why Ratcliffe is in Moscow this week rather than on a podium. Private channels are doing work the public record used to do. That is a workaround, and it does not scale to allies who need the commitment stated where their own publics can hear it.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

2/ Iran is the sharpest case. After June 2025 the assessments ran from a setback of months to many years, and the inspectorate that would have narrowed that range had been removed by the strike being assessed. No ally or adversary could establish what was true.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

1/ My new piece in Orbis is about a specific failure mode I call phantom signaling: a warning or accusation issued with no threshold named in advance and no consequence attached to crossing one. It looks like a signal from the outside and carries no information.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The Arms Control Paradox: Managing Uncertainty in an Insecure World. Stanford University Press, September 15. www.sup.org/books/politi...

sup.org

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The model we inherited assumed uncertainty could be negotiated away first. It can't be. That's much of why the most ambitious agreements collapse while narrower ones survive, and it's why I wrote the book.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

From Chapter One: "The durability of arms control agreements rests less on the threat of detection than on the shared information and aligned interests that make compliance self-reinforcing."

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

We tend to assume arms control agreements hold because violations would be caught. Detection is important, but it has never been the main thing keeping states in compliance. What keeps them in is having enough information about the other side to make staying in the better bet.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

The Arctic's most dangerous shift is happening beneath the ice. Mariam Kvaratskhelia warns that Russia is expanding its undersea nuclear forces on the Kola Peninsula, while Allied focus stays on land. Does deterrence work if neither side can verify what the other has? tinyurl.com/2nybn86f

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The way out isn't waiting for certainty. The Cold War standard was never perfect verification—it was adequate verification, calibrated deliberately below certainty. Durable agreements gave residual uncertainty a structure.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

That's the paradox. Need and feasibility scale with the same variable in opposite directions.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Arms control works when it manages enough uncertainty for the security environment it faces. For decades, counting did that work—warheads, launchers, delivery vehicles. The uncertainty was bounded, so the agreements could be too. That fit held for a long time.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

“Arms control isn’t about eliminating uncertainty. It’s about learning to manage it.” My book, The Arms Control Paradox, launches September 15. Since the announcement, this line has resonated more than any other. Here’s the argument behind it.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

The Arms Control Paradox began years ago as a simple question: how do we build lasting agreements in a world where technology outruns treaties? This week, my author copies arrived from @stanfordpress.bsky.social. To everyone who challenged my ideas or encouraged me—thank you. lnkd.in/enmfXVyT

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

U.S. #AI strategy is a sprint to dominate the #frontier, while Chinese AI strategy is a tool for #nationalrejuvenation. What happens when these irreconcilable #nationalmythologies clash in #crisis? Read my thoughts from my latest piece at @newamerica.org. tinyurl.com/9f68kpxe

tinyurl.com

The AI Race Is a Clash of Mythologies

The US-China AI race isn't just about compute and models. Competing national mythologies are what make a crisis escalate.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Last month, Future Security Scenarios Lab @newamerica.org merica.org gathered #nuclear policy experts for Control+Alt+Deter's Scenario Planning stage. They ran live crisis scenarios, stepping into the shoes of U.S. policymakers racing to restore deterrence.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

3/3 That has strategic consequences. New on the Future Security Scenarios Lab blog at @newamerica.org: newamerica.org/insights/operationalizing-imagination

newamerica.org

Operationalizing Imagination

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

2/3 Drawing on Ulrich Beck's risk society framework, she argues that imaginative capacity—the ability to envision alternatives—degrades under chronic crisis conditions. Societies reorganized around threat response become structurally less capable of generating them.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

1/3 Gen Z is more likely to believe WWIII is coming than that they'll afford a home. Kate Barranco asks: What does sustained exposure to catastrophe do to the futures a generation believes are possible? And what did our crises do to us?

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

"Peace through strength" sounds simple, but deterrence actually runs on legibility—currently in short supply. Troops out of Germany, surge to the Middle East—noise, not legible strategy. My thoughts @newamerica.org 👇 newamerica.org/insights/peace-through-strength-is-hard-to-read/

newamerica.org

“Peace Through Strength” Is Hard to Read

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

We’re in the print edition of @nytopinion.nytimes.com today. Sean Guillory and I write about the long term risks of prediction markets to national security. Check it out.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Excited to share my latest in @nytopinion.nytimes.com with co-author Sean Anthony Guillory: Prediction markets aren't just a finance story — they're a national security one. Read our full argument in NYT Opinion

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Two signals in one breath: no nuclear threat, total conventional threat. I don't know that the pairing produces restraint. If I'm Tehran, I'm doing that math.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

"Why would I use a nuclear weapon? We've totally, in a very conventional way, decimated them without it." That's not a principled no-use pledge. It's a capability one. Nukes are off the table because conventional dominance makes them unnecessary.

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

The Arms Control Paradox is now available for preorder here: bookshop.org/p/books/the-... Out September 15 @stanfordpress.bsky.social

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Amy J. Nelson @amyjnelsonphd.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

ICYMI: my conversation with @wjhenn.bsky.social at @newamerica.org on why nuclear danger is rising even as attention fades—and how repeated warnings can turn an existential threat into background noise—is streaming here 👇 www.newamerica.org/events/when-...

newamerica.org

When Nuclear Danger Becomes Background Noise: A Conversation with W.J. (“Bill”) Hennigan and Amy J. Nelson

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