What motivates leaders to pursue arms control? A prevailing conventional wisdom holds that exogenous crises which bring elites to the nuclear brink drive them to negotiate by teaching them the importance of mutual restraint. More recent findings from the behavioral revolution challenge this conventional wisdom, however, showing that endogenous factors—and, specifically, the beliefs leaders hold prior to entering office—are central to shaping their nuclear policies. But does this mean that crises play no role in driving leaders to engage in arms control, or that an existing belief in the value of mutual restraint is all that is needed for an arms control treaty to be concluded? This talk explores these questions and presents a new theory for how internal and external forces interact to bring leaders to the negotiating table.
Speaker Bio
Sarah Bidgood is a postdoctoral fellow in technology and international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), based in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on nuclear diplomacy and military innovation in the United States and Russian Federation. Sarah received her PhD in Defence Studies from King's College London. She holds a B.A. in Russian from Wellesley College, an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.A. in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
From 2023-2024, Sarah was a Stanton nuclear security fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program. Prior to this, she served as director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, where she remains a non-resident scholar. Sarah’s work has been published as single- and co-authored studies in journals such as International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, and Cold War History, as well as outlets including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Arms Control Today. She is a coauthor of Death Dust: The Rise, Decline, and Future of Radiological Weapons Programs, which was published by Stanford University Press in December 2023.