The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies presents:

The Second Annual Richard K. Betts Lecture on War and Peace:

“Challenges of the New Nuclear Age” with Caitlin Talmadge

Thursday, April 10, 2025

4pm-6pm

1512 IAB

Advance Registration Required.

Lecture by Caitlin Talmadge, Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Associate Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Program, Brookings Institution

Hosted by V. Page Fortna, Director, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies; Harold Brown Professor of US Foreign and Security Policy, Department of Political Science, Columbia University

Event Description:

Today’s world has many fewer nuclear weapons than during the Cold War, yet these weapons belong to a greater number of competitive and rivalrous nuclear actors. What does this emerging nuclear landscape mean for nuclear stability in peacetime, crisis, and war?

Speaker biography:

Caitlin Talmadge is the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also serves as a Senior Non-Resident Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution; a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense; and a series editor for Cornell Studies in Security Affairs at Cornell University Press.

Professor Talmadge’s research and teaching focus on nuclear deterrence and escalation, U.S. military operations and strategy, and security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. She is author of The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell, 2015), which Foreign Affairs named the Best Book in Security for 2016 and which won the 2017 Best Book Award from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. In addition, she is co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy (fourth edition, Routledge, 2021), and she is currently writing a book with Professor Brendan Green on nuclear escalation risks in conventional war.

Dr. Talmadge has published articles in International Security, Security Studies, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, The Non-Proliferation Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among others. She has also testified before the Congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and her commentary on current events has appeared in The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, Newsweek, and other media outlets such as CNN.

Dr. Talmadge is a graduate of Harvard (A.B., Government, summa cum laude) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., Political Science). Previously, she has worked as a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; a consultant to the Office of Net Assessment at the U.S. Department of Defense; and a professor at the George Washington University and Georgetown University. For more information, please visit caitlintalmadge.com or follow her on Twitter @ProfTalmadge.