Nuclear Responsibility: Defining Responsible Nuclear Statecraft in an Era of Great Power Competition

What does it mean to be a responsible nuclear power in 2025? As strategic competition, and indeed great power competition, reemerged in the late 2010s and early 2020s, competing nuclear states increasingly employ the language of nuclear responsibility to label a strategic competitor as an irresponsible actor on the international stage. However, there remains a lack of consensus on what responsibilities nuclear-weapon states are assigned while other states and scholars argue that the possession of nuclear weapons can never be responsible. In Nuclear Responsibility: Defining Responsible Nuclear Statecraft in an Era of Great Power Competition, the editors Todd C. Robinson and Stephanie A. Stapleton have asked a broad range of nuclear scholars and policy practitioners to answer the question, “What is nuclear responsibility?”

Table of Contents:
List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction by Todd C. Robinson, Air Command and Staff College, USA and Stephanie A. Stapleton, Kennesaw State University, USA Chapter 1: Reconceptualizing Nuclear Responsibility by Todd C. Robinson, Air Command and Staff College, USA and Alice Spilman, University of Birmingham, UK Chapter 2: From One Cold War to the Next: Hedging as an Enduring Imperative by Kyle Balzer, American Enterprise Institute, USA Chapter 3: Nuclear Responsibility and the Shift in U.S. Disarmament Rhetoric by Tyler Bowen, U.S. Naval War College, USA Chapter 4: The Emerging American Consensus on the Responsibility to Modernize, Compete, and Win by Robert Peters, The Heritage Foundation, USA Chapter 5: Nuclear Responsibility in an Age of Integrated Deterrence: Does “Doing More” Lead to Better Responsibility? by E. Paige Reid, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, USA Chapter 6: Sharing is Caring? The (Ir)responsibility of NATO's Nuclear Sharing Policy by Linde Desmaele, Leiden University, Netherlands Chapter 7: China's Views of Its Responsibilities as a Nuclear Weapon State by Brendan Mulvaney, China Aerospace Studies Institute, USA Chapter 8: Shifting Responsibilities: North Korea's Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons as a Security Imperative by Jinwon Lee, University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign, USA Chapter 9: Gender, Feminism, and Constructions of Nuclear Responsibility by Sophia Poteet, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, USA Chapter 10: Beyond Blame: Fostering Inclusive Dialogue on Nuclear Responsibilities by Eva-Nour Repussard, British American Security Information Council, UK Chapter 11: Justification and critique in the global nuclear order: Nuclear (ir)responsibility as practice by Megan Dee, University of Stirling, UK Conclusion by Todd C. Robinson, Air Command and Staff College, USA and Stephanie A. Stapleton, Kennesaw State University, USA Bibliography About the Editors About the Contributors

About the Author :
Todd C. Robinson is Associate Professor of military and security studies with the School for Advanced Nuclear Deterrence Studies at the Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB. Stephanie A. Stapleton is a research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses and a PhD candidate in international conflict management at Kennesaw State University where she focuses on nuclear policy issues.