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An occasional series by scholars, think tank analysts, activists, and other experts who are 35 or younger, have never been published in Arms ControlToday and offer fresh perspectives on arms control.
Although automation and basic artificial intelligence (AI) have been a part of nuclear weapons systems for decades,1 the integration of modern AI machine learning programs with nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) systems could mitigate human error or bias in nuclear decision-making. In doing so, AI could help prevent egregious errors from being made in crisis scenarios when nuclear risk is greatest. Even so, AI comes with its own set of unique limitations; if unaddressed, they could raise the chance of nuclear use in the most dangerous manner possible: subtly and without warning.
With Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine and the resultant new low in Russian-U.S. relations, the threat of nuclear war is again at the forefront of international discussion. To help prevent this conflict from devolving into a devastating use of nuclear weapons, AI systems could be used to assess enormous amounts of intelligence data exponentially faster than a human analyst and without many of the less favorable aspects of human decisionmaking, such as bias, anger, fear, and prejudice. In doing so, these systems would be providing decision-makers with the best possible information for use in a crisis.
China, Russia, and the United States are increasingly accepting the benefits of this kind of AI integration and feeling competitive pressures to operationalize it in their respective military systems.2 Although public or open-source statements on how this would occur within their nuclear programs is sparse, the classic example of the Perimeter, or "Dead Hand," system established in the Soviet Union during the Cold War and still in use in Russia points to high levels of automation within nuclear systems.
In the United States, there is a desire to modernize the aging NC3 system.3 As the 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review stated, "The United States will continue to adapt new technologies for information display and data analysis to improve support for Presidential decision making and senior leadership consultations."4 There is no direct mention of AI, but this statement is in line with how AI integration with NC3 systems could take shape. Given competitive drivers, the...