Description:

The Grand Strategy Program continues its spring book series with political scientist Fiona Cunningham’s new book, Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton University Press). Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries. Under the Nuclear Shadow examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.”

Cunningham is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at Yale University. She studies the effects of technology on international security with an empirical focus on China, examining nuclear strategy, escalation dynamics, and other novel sources of leverage in international politics in East Asia. Cunningham will be in conversation with Alex Debs, Associate Professor in Yale’s Department of Political Science.