As global nuclear risks rise—from Russia’s treaty violations to China’s expanding arsenal—Washington remains caught in a tired debate: Arms control or deterrence? This binary framing is not only misleading; it’s dangerous. Nuclear stability depends on how these concepts interact within a larger system, a view rooted in systems thinking that was once central to US nuclear policy but is now conspicuously absent.
During the Cold War, US policymakers understood arms control and deterrence as interdependent—two tools for reinforcing strategic stability. As Robert Jervis wrote in 2022, “Arms control . . . should be designed to bolster deterrence or at least to avoid weapons configurations that would undermine it and make war more likely.” The 1972 SALT I and ABM treaties, for instance, were negotiated not despite deterrence goals, but in service of them. This essay is not a defense of any single policy, but a call to recover the strategic mindset that saw arms control and deterrence as mutually reinforcing. That approach is increasingly absent in today’s debates.
From Systems Thinking to Siloed Strategy
Many in the foreign policy, defense, and national security communities come from backgrounds in international relations, a discipline in which the concept of the system does the heavy lifting: It refers to the overarching structure of international politics that shapes and constrains state behavior.
Early international relations theorists like Kenneth Waltz described an “anarchic” international system, without a central authority, where power dynamics shape state behavior. Jervis deepened this view, showing how seemingly rational actions can produce chaotic outcomes in a tightly coupled, nonlinear system. Additionally, he enriches our understanding of the system by bringing to bear concepts such as feedback loops, misperceptions, and unintended consequences. In so doing, Jervis pushes international relations scholars to account for the nonlinear dynamics of systemic interaction, an approach that is especially relevant today, as complex global crises—such as climate change, great-power rivalry, and rapid technological disruption—exacerbate complexity, defy straightforward cause-and-effect thinking, and often lead to unpredictable outcomes in a rapidly changing world.
The systems approach also directly influenced nuclear weapons policy, which emerged around the same time as Waltz’s influential book, Man, the State, and War, and is embedded within the broader dynamics of the international system. The holy grail was thought to be strategic stability, describing an international system in which no state has an incentive to launch a first strike because mutual vulnerability and assured second-strike capabilities deter aggression and reduce the risk of escalation. In this system, deterrence, defined as the ability to persuade adversaries not to act by convincing them the costs will outweigh any potential benefits, functions as the behavioral logic that maintains this stability, while arms control, which is defined as the management of military capabilities and behaviors between adversaries to reduce the likelihood, destructiveness, or uncontrollability of conflict, codifies limitations that reduce incentives for preemption or arms racing and promotes the transparency conducive to restraint.
These ideas weren’t academic abstractions; they fundamentally shaped US decision-making during the Cold War, with enormous implications for nuclear strategy today. Yet they’ve largely disappeared from view, just when we need them most.
Arms Control and Deterrence: Not Either/Or
Too often, today’s debate treats arms control and deterrence as competing strategies—despite history and international relations scholarship showing they work best in tandem. Nuclear scholars and policymakers face the challenging task of considering the entire system when thinking about nuclear security, advising, and making policy in order to anticipate how decisions in one area, such as posture, signaling, or arms control, can ripple across the system in unforeseen ways.
With that in mind, the current dichotomy between arms control and deterrence approaches to the US nuclear arsenal is a false one. If arms control falls away, the system risks spiraling into an unconstrained arms race, eroding trust, transparency, and crisis stability. Conversely, if deterrence fails or is ignored, the credibility of US security guarantees collapses, increasing the likelihood of aggression, coercion, or even nuclear use. Strategic stability breaks down when either pillar collapses.
In recent years, a growing divide has emerged in US nuclear policy debates. On one side, some argue deterrence must take precedence in an increasingly competitive world, warning that arms control agreements risk constraining US flexibility without meaningfully influencing adversaries. On the other side, arms control advocates caution that unchecked nuclear modernization and posture shifts, including from reintroducing a nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile capability (known as SLCM-N) or expanding warhead types, risk arms races and crisis instability. These positions are often treated as oppositional, but that division is a break from how US strategy was once conceived.
On one side of the debate, the notion that we must wait for perfect conditions to engage in arms control (sometimes deliberately) misunderstands its purpose: Arms control is not a reward for good behavior but a tool for managing risk, reducing miscalculation, and stabilizing inherently adversarial relationships. Delaying its pursuit only increases the danger of escalation in an already volatile system. Consider the US plan to deploy the SLCM-N. It may strengthen deterrence, but without clear signaling mechanisms, it could increase the risk of miscalculation. Arms control tools like notification protocols or reciprocal inspections can reduce that risk.
On the other side of the debate, some advocates argue that arms control and nonproliferation must always take precedence, even to the point of resisting consideration of new capabilities that might be needed to ensure credible deterrence. They emphasize that the United States, as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, is legally committed and morally obligated to pursue the long-term project of arms control as a pathway toward eventual disarmament—a goal that reinforces global norms, sustains international legitimacy, and reduces the existential risks posed by nuclear weapons.
While this perspective rightly underscores the ethical and strategic importance of restraint, it risks overlooking the fact that deterrence and arms control must function to sustain the broader stability of the international system. Refusing to consider evolving deterrence requirements in light of the current security environment may weaken the credibility of US commitments and reduce the leverage needed to bring adversaries to the arms control table. To arms control advocates, deterrence thinking may seem flawed and carry profound risks given its reliance on psychological signaling, threat credibility, and the willingness to follow through on catastrophic action, rather than mutual interest in preventing war. Further, from this perspective, it rests on inherently fragile assumptions and is vulnerable to miscalculation, misperception, and technological disruptions. But this approach does not sufficiently engage with the truth that, as long as nuclear weapons exist, they remain an essential part of the strategic landscape that cannot be ignored.
With that in mind, it is also essential to consider the adaptive nature of deterrence itself. As adversaries develop novel technologies and shift their strategic postures, deterrence strategies must also evolve to remain effective. Refusing to discuss force posture or modernization under the banner of arms control purity may weaken deterrence and embolden potential challengers. Just as arms control is a tool to manage competition, credible deterrence is the foundation upon which arms control agreements are negotiated and sustained. Dismissing one in favor of the other creates strategic blind spots and undermines the systemic balance needed to prevent conflict today.
Reclaiming Systems Thinking for Strategic Stability
While many in foreign policy and national security may not explicitly engage with international relations theory, systems thinking is hardly foreign to the field. Concepts like network-centric warfare, which gained traction in the 1990s, treat military forces as interconnected nodes, where information-sharing and distributed decision-making enable faster, more adaptive operations.
Additionally, after 9/11, systems-based frameworks became central to homeland security planning, most notably in the Department of Homeland Security’s recognition of complex interdependencies and the risk of cascading failures from attacks or natural disasters. In other words, we’ve done this before. Systems thinking is not a novelty, but a proven approach with which policymakers can and must reengage, especially in the nuclear domain and particularly now, when the system is stressed and at a higher risk of destabilization.
The lesson has been clear in every era: When we treat parts of the international system in isolation—whether arms control, deterrence, or broader security policy—we risk undermining our own goals. The global landscape is becoming more complex, interconnected, and unpredictable, with feedback loops and nonlinear dynamics accelerating systemic risk. In this environment, siloed thinking is worse than outdated—it’s dangerous. We need not dogma, but nuclear fluency grounded in systems thinking. This means teaching this mindset throughout our institutions, especially in professional military education, where future decision-makers must understand how nuclear weapons function and how the surrounding system behaves. Advancing this kind of thinking is central to the mission of our new lab, because the future of strategic stability may well depend on it.
Amy J. Nelson is a senior fellow with the Future Security Program at New America, where she serves as director of the Future Security Scenarios Lab.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Vitaly V. Kuzmin
