November 2026
By Gregory D. Koblentz

In early October 2026, Sabrina Dallafior, the newly elected director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international organization responsible for enforcing the Chemical Weapons Convention that bans chemical weapons, visited Damascus for the first time. Although President Bashar al-Assad signed the CWC in September 2013 and the OPCW destroyed Syria’s declared chemical weapons by 2014, Assad hid an undeclared portion of his arsenal and continued using chemical weapons against civilians until his overthrow in December 2024.

Since Assad’s fall and the formation of a new Syrian government under President Ahmad al-Sharaa, Syria has forged a new relationship with the OPCW and taken several concrete steps to comply with the convention. The CWC states-parties acknowledged these initial accomplishments by voting unanimously in July to restore Syria’s rights and privileges at OPCW, which had been stripped in 2021 due to the Assad regime’s brazen treaty violations.

Dallafior’s visit was a recognition of the progress that Syria has made, as well as the challenges remaining, to address Assad’s toxic legacy. She visited, however, in the shadow of an OPCW financial crisis that threatens to undermine this progress and the global chemical weapons nonproliferation regime more generally.¹

A comprehensive effort to clean up Assad’s toxic legacy rests on three pillars: verification and destruction of the former Syrian government’s chemical weapon program; accountability for regime officials who were responsible for using chemical weapons; and support for the victims of these chemical attacks. So far, Syria has made the most progress on verification and destruction and taken promising steps toward accountability. Providing support for victims and their families has received the least attention.

Likewise, international assistance to Syria is most extensive, but still insufficient, for verification and destruction, while it is just beginning to take shape on accountability and is completely lacking when it comes to supporting victims. The serious challenges that Syria faces in each of these areas are surmountable, but only through close cooperation with the OPCW and other international partners.

Verification and Destruction

Following its accession to the CWC in September 2013, Syria declared possession of more than 1,300 metric tons of chemical warfare agents and precursors, 27 chemical weapon production facilities, and more than 1,000 empty chemical munitions. Although the OPCW supervised the destruction of this material over the next year, it was never able to verify that Syria had declared its complete chemical weapon program, as required by the treaty.

Over the next 11 years, the OPCW identified 26 outstanding issues with Syria’s declaration, 19 of which were still unresolved when the Assad regime fell. These unresolved compliance issues, according to the OPCW, represented a “serious concern” because they involved “large quantities of chemical warfare agents and munitions that were reportedly destroyed or otherwise consumed … the fate of which cannot be fully verified by the Secretariat.”² In total, there could be dozens of metric tons of nerve agent precursors, hundreds of tons of chemical warfare agents, and hundreds or even thousands of munitions still unaccounted for in Syria.³

In May 2026, Syria and the OPCW announced a major breakthrough: the discovery of dozens of empty chemical munitions, as well as chemicals and equipment used to produce chemical weapons, at three undeclared sites located in the region around Hama, Homs, and Latakia that remained the Assad regime’s stronghold until the very end.⁴ In June, Syria submitted an amended declaration to the OPCW based on this discovery, the first such amendment submitted during the post-Assad era.

The chemical munitions that were recovered were the same type as those used by the Assad government in its deadliest chemical attacks of the civil war. The munitions included 25 of the so-called Volcano rockets that were used to bombard the Damascus suburbs of East Ghouta with the nerve agent sarin August 21, 2013, killing more than 1,000 civilians, and 54 M4000 binary chemical bombs, the same type used in the sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017 that killed 100 civilians.⁵ This small arsenal, if filled with sarin, would have been capable of killing thousands more. The munitions and associated chemicals and equipment were then moved to two secure storage locations subject to verification by the OPCW. In August 2026, Syria began the process of destroying the weapons under OPCW supervision, the first such verified destruction activity in Syria since 2014, with an initial batch of 42 binary bombs being cut into pieces.⁶

This initial discovery is likely the tip of the iceberg of Assad’s secret chemical weapons. The OPCW has so far only been able to visit fewer than half of the 16 highest-priority sites it has identified among the 100 undeclared sites suspected of involvement in Assad’s chemical weapons program. Over the last year, Syria has turned over to the OPCW more than 100,000 documents from the program that may hold clues to additional undeclared sites and chemical weapons-related materials.⁷

The progress on uncovering the hidden remnants of Assad’s chemical weapons was the product of an intensive Syrian search effort advised and assisted by the OPCW and international partners. Syria has established a national interagency body involving the Syrian National Authority and the ministries of Emergency and Disaster Management, Defense, and Interior to field teams that investigate suspect sites and make sure they are safe and secure enough for OPCW inspectors to visit.⁸

In March 2026, Syria announced the launch of an international group, the Breath of Freedom task force, to support its efforts to locate, secure, and destroy leftover chemical weapons. The task force, composed of Canada, France, Germany, Qatar, Syria, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, has helped Syria identify its personnel, training, equipment, and management needs; provided direct assistance; and served as a coordination mechanism for international assistance.

Accountability

Accountability for regime officials who authorized, planned, conducted, and enabled the use of chemical weapons is the second pillar of a comprehensive approach to addressing the Assad regime’s crimes. As I have written previously, “The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 created an unprecedented opportunity to hold the perpetrators of these attacks—the scientists who developed the poisons, the military officers [who] launched the weapons and the leaders who planned their use—accountable for their actions.”⁹ The quest for justice for the victims and survivors of Assad’s chemical atrocities has been making slow but steady progress since then.

The Assad officials most responsible for the chemical attacks—such as the former president; his brother, Maher, who commanded the 4th Armored Division that spearheaded the August 2013 assault on Ghouta; Suhail Hassan, the former commander of the Tiger Forces, which conducted chlorine barrel bombings across Syria; and Bassam Hassan, who oversaw Syria’s chemical weapons program and was a senior adviser to Assad—reside in Lebanon and Russia and hence, are currently beyond the new Syrian government’s reach.¹⁰

Nonetheless, Syria has arrested at least 18 former officials, including high-ranking military and security officers and experts from the Scientific Studies and Research Center—which developed Syria’s chemical weapons—who were linked to chemical weapons use during the civil war.¹¹ One of the most important in custody is Maj. Gen. Wajih Ali al-Abdullah, who reportedly ran the president’s military affairs office from 2005 to 2018 and reported directly to Assad.¹² This office was a key node at the top of Syria’s chemical weapon chain of command, meaning that Abdullah would have been personally involved in, or had direct knowledge of, virtually every chemical attack the Assad regime launched during the civil war.

Two senior Syrian air force commanders, Maj. Gen. Jayez Al-Mousa and Maj. Gen. Meezar Sawan, who were sanctioned by the European Union and UK for their role in chemical attacks, have also been arrested.¹³ The Syrian government also has in custody the top commanders of Syria’s Artillery and Missile Directorate, Brig. Gen. Adnan Abboud Hilweh and Maj. Gen. Tahir Hamid Khalil, who have been sanctioned by multiple countries, including the United States, for their role in the 2013 sarin attack on Ghouta.¹⁴

Another notable arrest was Col. Ahmad Habib Ali, a senior officer in Branch 450, the elite Syrian military unit responsible for guarding, transporting, and deploying chemical weapons. According to Syria’s Interior Ministry, “preliminary investigations indicated that Ali supervised the production of approximately 20 aerial bombs loaded with sarin gas.”¹⁵ It is highly likely that Ali was the anonymous Branch 450 colonel identified by the OPCW’s Investigation and Identification Team as being present at Shayrat air base when it was used to launch attacks with sarin-filled bombs against the towns of Latamneh and Khan Sheikhoun in March and April 2017.¹⁶

The new Syrian government has stated repeatedly that holding Assad-regime officials accountable for their crimes, including the use of chemical weapons, is a top priority. Syria has been preparing a transitional justice process since May 2026 to investigate and prosecute the human rights violations committed by the former government. The first trial of Assad regime officials concluded in August 2026 with nine senior members—eight of whom were tried in absentia, including Bashar and Maher al-Assad—convicted and sentenced to death for an array of crimes, including war crimes and crimes against humanity.¹⁷

Although it is not unexpected that the first such trial in post-Assad Syria was marred by some weaknesses, prosecuting perpetrators for chemical weapon-related crimes will be even more challenging.¹⁸ The cases themselves will be complex and could feature a broad assortment of evidence such as forensic analyses, technical reports from international investigators, documents from the chemical warfare program, declassified intelligence from international partners, and testimony by witnesses and experts. As the first-ever prosecution of former government officials for using chemical weapons against their own people, these trials will have high stakes and implications that extend beyond Syria.

The officials, officers, and scientists arrested so far represent only a fraction of the Syrian chemical weapons enterprise that was responsible for so much death and misery during the civil war. Yet, by putting them on trial, the Syrian government will send a strong message that the perpetrators of chemical atrocities will be brought to justice. Such a trial would provide an opportunity for prosecutors to provide compelling evidence of Assad’s systematic use of chemical weapons, even after it signed the CWC, as part of its brutal counterinsurgency operations. Survivors will be able to testify about the appalling effects of these attacks and remind the international community why these barbaric weapons are outlawed.

Syria’s international partners can play a constructive role in this process by rebuilding Syria’s justice system, including the capacity to prosecute complex cases involving chemical weapons.¹⁹ International agencies can also play important roles, such as the UN’s International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria, which can provide the case files it has built on specific chemical attacks; Interpol, which can facilitate the arrest and extradition of Syrian war criminals who fled to other countries; and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, which can deliver specialized training on how to investigate and prosecute crimes involving chemical weapons.²⁰

Syria also needs an international mechanism to help it identify its legal and organizational needs for investigating and prosecuting chemical weapon-related crimes, coordinate the provision of training and other assistance to judicial and law enforcement personnel, and facilitate sharing open-source information and intelligence on wanted fugitives and suspects in custody.

The International Partnership against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons, a group of 41 countries dedicated to strengthening the chemical weapon taboo, could fill this gap.²¹ For example, this group, initially established by France in 2018 to coordinate the imposition of sanctions, could coordinate declassified intelligence sharing with Syrian judicial authorities, based on the evidentiary packages compiled by Western governments as part of their process for imposing sanctions on Syrians involved in the use of chemical weapons during the Assad era. In October 2026, Syria joined the partnership, an important first step to realizing this group’s potential to build Syria’s capacity for holding perpetrators of chemical attacks accountable.²² “Minilateral” initiatives, such as the partnership and the Breath of Freedom task force, are designed to reinforce, not replace, the OPCW’s role in Syria.

Support for Victims

The 13-year-long Syrian civil war generated some gruesome statistics. Independent experts estimate that the Assad regime used chemical weapons at least 340 times.²³ Syrian human rights groups estimate that during the civil war at least 1,500 people were killed by chemical weapons and at least 12,000 more were injured.²⁴ In addition to the victims who succumbed to acute chemical poisoning, physicians have documented chronic, long-term symptoms more than a decade later among the survivors of the 2013 sarin attack on Ghouta.²⁵

Women and children are known to be more susceptible to these long-term health effects.²⁶ Among sarin’s more sinister effects are those on the unborn. Pregnant women exposed to sarin at Ghouta have experienced a much higher rate of miscarriages and children born with birth defects.²⁷ There is also some evidence that this phenomenon can continue for years after a chemical attack occurs.²⁸ Longitudinal studies of Syrian victims of chemical warfare, however, are rare and so the scope and severity of these long-term effects is not well understood.

Although physical violence typically leaves scars, the long-term symptoms of chemical weapons can be more insidious. Countless Syrians, including first responders, survivors, and family members of victims and survivors, are still dealing with the psychological trauma of witnessing, responding to, or otherwise experiencing one of Assad’s chemical attacks.²⁹

The toxic effects of chemical weapons can also persist in the environment, damaging local communities and their future generations. A recent study of Halabja, a town in Iraqi Kurdistan that was subjected to a large-scale chemical attack by Saddam Hussein in 1988, found evidence that biologically active chemical warfare agent degradation products persist in the environment nearly 40 years later.³⁰ Syria is littered with sites of chemical attacks, places where toxic chemicals were improperly stored or disposed by the Assad regime, and the detritus of chemical weapon storage facilities bombed by the United States or Israel during and after the civil war.

Although international humanitarian organizations, such as the Syrian American Medical Society, Doctors Without Borders, and the White Helmets, provided heroic medical assistance to the immediate victims of Assad’s chemical atrocities, the plight of survivors has not received sufficient attention in the post-Assad era. This is in some ways understandable, as the duration and brutality of the civil war means that an entire generation of Syrians has suffered enormously—physically and mentally.

There is, unfortunately, substantial medical literature on how to recognize and manage the long-term physical, neurological, and psychological symptoms of exposure to chemical weapons such as sarin, chlorine, and sulfur mustard,³¹ but this knowledge is only useful if healthcare providers in Syria are aware of it and have the training and resources to provide appropriate treatments to their patients. Identifying the long-term hazards of environmental contamination with toxic chemicals requires specialized equipment and analysis not currently available in Syria.

Unlike the destruction and accountability components of Syria’s response, there is no international group to coordinate assistance to Syrian victims of chemical attacks, provide educational and medicinal resources to Syrian healthcare providers, or to map and mitigate the hazards presented by contaminated sites. The OPCW’s International Support Network for Victims of Chemical Weapons could provide a framework for international cooperation to address the medical and mental health needs of survivors. The network, however, relies on voluntary contributions and this has severely limited its activities in recent years. In addition, Syrian nongovernmental organizations have been blocked from participating in the OPCW’s Conference of the States Parties for several years, thus limiting their ability to participate in important discussions about how the OPCW can best support Syrian victims of chemical weapons.³²

Dallafior in Damascus

During Dallafior’s visit to Damascus in early October 2026, the OPCW director-general engaged her Syrian counterparts on each of these pillars. With Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani, she discussed plans for a road map that would identify the many outstanding issues and the steps that Syria must take to resolve them.³³ Dallafior also met with Defense Minister Maj. Gen. Murhaf Abu Qasra to discuss Syria’s efforts to locate, secure, and destroy the remnants of Assad’s chemical weapons program.³⁴ She received a guided tour of one of the sites being used to store the recently discovered chemical weapons, as well as of the facility used to destroy the first batch of these weapons in August.

On the accountability pillar, she met with Justice Minister Mazhar al-Wais, Attorney General Hassan al-Turba, and Minister of Emergency and Disaster Management Raed al-Saleh to discuss ongoing investigations of chemical attacks and opportunities to secure justice for victims by prosecuting the responsible officials from the Assad regime.³⁵

On support for victims, Dallafior met survivors of the August 2013 attack on East Ghouta and their families, heard their accounts of that horrific atrocity, and visited victims’ graves. According to Mohamad Katoub, Syria’s OPCW ambassador, this meeting was “the first such engagement with victims’ families and visit to a cemetery of chemical weapons victims. These steps send a clear message that addressing the legacy of the Assad era CW programme is not limited to international security, but also justice, and the redress of victims.”³⁶

Although the substance of the meetings between OPCW and Syrian officials has not yet been reported, they certainly served an important symbolic function. The contrast between the Assad regime’s deceptive approach to the OPCW and its brazen violations of the CWC with the Sharaa government’s eagerness to cooperate with the organization is stark. Dallafior’s visit was a reward to Damascus for maintaining its commitment to coming into compliance with the treaty, despite the many other demands upon the government, and a reminder to the international community that Assad’s chemical weapons did not disappear when he fled the country.

In addition, by including high-profile events related to accountability and by meeting survivors and victims’ families, Dallafior elevated justice and support for victims to being of equal importance to the OPCW’s traditional mission of chemical weapon verification and destruction. This is not only righteous but also realistic because the three pillars are, in fact, connected. The search for Assad’s remaining chemical weapons necessitates locating and interrogating former officials who may bear legal responsibility for the government’s crimes or have valuable information about those who do. The same documents that the OPCW needs to locate missing chemicals or munitions may also provide information useful for verification purposes or evidence that Syrian prosecutors can use in the courtroom. The survivors of chemical attacks were not just victims, but also witnesses who can be valuable participants in the legal process to hold Assad-era officials accountable. Studying the acute and chronic effects of exposure to chemical warfare agents is necessary, not only for epidemiological purposes to guide public health research, but also to contribute to the evidentiary record of Assad’s extensive and systematic use of chemical weapons against civilians.

This ambitious and vital undertaking, however, is threatened by an OPCW financial crisis. Less than a week before Dallafior departed for Damascus, she told diplomats attending a meeting of the OPCW Executive Council that the organization was running out of money due to the failure of states-parties to pay their annual dues on time. The United States, the organization’s largest donor, is also the biggest laggard, having failed to pay 80 percent of its obligation for the year.³⁷ According to Dallafior, the “stark reality” is that the OPCW “may have to curtail core activities if the situation does not improve soon, including in relation to Syria deployments and other forms of technical assistance.”³⁸ Ahmet Üzümcü, OPCW director-general at the height of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, has echoed Dallafior’s warning about the potential impact of this “alarming” situation on the chemical weapons nonproliferation regime.³⁹

The Syrian case represents the first time that the OPCW has been faced with the twin challenges of reintegrating a treaty violator back into the chemical weapons nonproliferation regime and helping that government, and its citizens, navigate the aftermath of widespread chemical warfare. The OPCW’s three-pronged approach toward Syria of verification and destruction, accountability, and victim support is highly promising, but it will require patience and resources to succeed. Failing to fully support the OPCW now would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

ENDNOTES

1. Gregory D. Koblentz, “Chemical Security is National Security,” Lawfare, October 25, 2026.

2. Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, “Report by the Director-General: Progress in the Elimination of the Syrian Chemical Weapons Programme,” EC-108/DG.3, December 24, 2024.

3. Gregory D. Koblentz and Natasha Hall, “Syria Still Has Chemical Weapons: How to Get the Country’s New Rulers to Help Eliminate Assad’s Deadly Arsenal,” Foreign Affairs, December 19, 2024.

4. OPCW, “Deployment of OPCW expert team to Syrian Arab Republic finds chemical weapons previously undeclared to the Organisation,” May 27, 2026.

5. “Syria discovers stockpiles from former Assad regime’s chemical weapons programme,” TRT World, May 26, 2026; “Ongoing evidence exposes lies of deposed regime’s chemical weapons claims,” Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), May 27, 2026.

6. United Nations, “First Verified Destruction of Syrian Chemical Munitions Since 2014 Marks ‘Significant Progress’, Disarmament Chief Tells Security Council,” SC/16445, September 3, 2026.

7. “Syria submits 100,000 documents on deposed regime’s chemical program,” SANA, October 14, 2026.

8. “Coping with Syria’s Chemical Weapons Legacy: An Interview with Mohamad Katoub, Syrian Ambassador to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” Arms Control Today, Vol. 56, No. 4, (May 2026).

9. Gregory D. Koblentz, “Justice is finally within reach for victims of Syria’s chemical weapons attacks,” The Hill, January 10, 2026.

10. “The Missing Enforcers of the Assad Regime,” The New York Times, October 15, 2025.

11. Anthony Deutsch, “Remnants of Assad’s chemical weapons program recovered, Syrian official says,” Reuters, May 26, 2026.

12. “Wajih Al-Abdullah, Director of the Ousted President’s Office, in the Grip of Syrian Security,” Sada News Agency, May 10, 2026.

13. “Syria arrests al-Assad-era air force officer under EU, UK sanctions,” Al Arabiya English, June 25, 2025; “Syria arrests former Assad-era air force chief of staff,” Arab News, May 12, 2026.

14. Ibid.; The New York Times, October 15, 2025.

15. “Syria’s Interior Ministry arrests ousted regime official over sarin weapons program,” SANA, July 15, 2026.

16. OPCW, “First Report by the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team Pursuant to Paragraph 10 of Decision C-SS-4/DEC.3 ‘Addressing the Threat from Chemical Weapons Use,” Ltamenah (Syrian Arab Republic) 24, 25, and 30 March 2017,’ S/1867/2020, April 8, 2020.

17. Human Rights Watch, “Questions & Answers: Syria’s First and Future Trials for Assad-Era Crimes,” August 23, 2026.

18. Fadel Abdulghany and Kenneth Roth, “A Sentence in Damascus and An Accused in Moscow: The Limits of Syria’s First Attempt at Accountability,” Just Security, August 28, 2026.

19. Syrian Network for Human Rights, “SNHR’s Vision for Transitional Justice in Syria,” April 17, 2025; Human Rights Watch, “Recommendations on Next Steps for Comprehensive Justice for Syria,” November 17, 2025.

20. International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria, “Advancing Accountability for Chemical Weapons Crimes,” October 1, 2025; United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, “New capacity-building and training package: Building a case for the prosecution and adjudication of chemical and biological crimes,” February 21, 2023.

21. Gregory D. Koblentz, “#NoImpunity: Will the Newest International Effort to Stop Chemical Attacks in Syria Succeed?” War on the Rocks, March 2, 2018.

22. “Syria welcomes joining International Partnership against Chemical Weapons Impunity,” SANA, October 6, 2026.

23. Tobias Schneider, Theresa Lütkefend, “Nowhere to Hide: The Logic of Chemical Weapons Use in Syria,” Global Public Policy Institute, February 2019.

24. Syrian Network for Human Rights, “Between Pain and Agony: 12 Years of Chemical Weapons Crimes in Syria,” November 29, 2024.

25. MHD Bahaa Aldin Alhaffar, et al., “Short and long-term health consequences of the 2013 Sarin attack in Ghouta, Syria: a retrospective descriptive study of civilian survivors,” Scientific Reports, Vol. 16, Article 11,379 (2026).

26. Inji El Bakry and Tobias Schneider, “The Last Straw: How Chemical Weapons Impact Women and Break Communities,” Global Public Policy Institute, February 2023; JM Talabani, et al., “Long-term health effects of chemical warfare agents on children following a single heavy exposure,” Human & Experimental Toxicology, Vol. 37, No. 8 (2018), pp. 836-847.

27. Mohanad Al-Khatib and Sawsan Jabri, “Adverse birth outcomes in women exposed to Syrian chemical attack,” The Lancet Global Health, Vol. 3, No. 4 (April 2015).

28. Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, “A Toxic Legacy: Chemical Weapons and Birth Defects in Syria,” December 2, 2021.

29. Alhaffar, et al., 2026.

30. Hanna Hakulinen, et al., “Detection of degradation products of chemical warfare agents in Halabja soil: In vitro genotoxicity and effects in exposed humans,” Journal of Hazardous Materials, Vol. 518, Article 143,882 (November 2026).

31. Faraidoun Moradi, “Research on the Adverse Health Effects of Chemical Weapons on Civilian Survivors: Challenges and Opportunities,” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, Vol. 19, e297 (October 2025).

32. Chemical Weapons Convention Coalition, “NGO Statement on Civil Society Participation and Transparency,” November 27, 2024.

33. “Al-Shaibani: Syria has fully cooperated with OPCW towards final closure of the file,” SANA, October 13, 2026.

34. “Defense minister discusses chemical weapons remnants with OPCW chief,” SANA, October 13, 2026.

35. “Justice minister, OPCW chief discuss accountability for chemical weapons use,” SANA, October 13, 2026; “Syria, OPCW examine progress in dismantling deposed regime’s chemical weapons legacy,” SANA, October 13, 2026.

36. Mohamad Katoub, “It was a pleasure to welcome H.E. Ambassador Sabrina Dallafior,” LinkedIn, October 14, 2026.

37. Adam Taylor, “State Dept. funding delay imperils plan to destroy Syrian chemical weapons,” The Washington Post, October 13, 2026.

38. Sabrina Dallafior, “Opening Statement by the Director-General to the 113th Session of the Executive Council,” October 6, 2026.

39. Ahmet Üzümcü, “The OPCW’s funding crisis is a threat to global security,” European Leadership Network, October 13, 2026.

Gregory D. Koblentz is an associate professor and director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. 

November 2026
By Darryl Scarborough

Keeping a human in the loop does not ensure human control over nuclear use. Algorithms may still determine which warnings reach leaders and how uncertainty appears. Analytical models may also shape which responses seem feasible. Formal launch authority can then remain human even as practical control shifts toward the systems that structure the decision.

The nuclear threshold once evoked a Cold War radar console and the judgment of a Soviet officer such as Stanislav Petrov. On September 26, 1983, the Soviet Oko early warning system reported a U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile launch. It then reported four more.¹ Petrov judged the alert false and waited for corroboration that never came.² Modern warning systems instead rely on distributed sensors, servers, and decision-support tools. The central issue is not only who authorizes use but also what information reaches that person and how much time remains to question it.

Artificial intelligence-enabled decision support systems can classify sensor data, combine information from multiple sources, assess threats, and prioritize options for human review.³ The danger is not limited to autonomous launch authority. These systems can shape the evidence, timing, and choices on which a human decision rests. Operational safeguards are consequently essential.

This dynamic creates a stability paradox along three connected pathways. Opaque algorithmic inference can weaken confidence in verification. Compressed warning cycles can reduce time for scrutiny. Faster sensor fusion can also cast doubt on the survivability of mobile forces. These pressures converge in nuclear command, control, and communications systems. Greater speed may improve awareness but leave less room for independent judgment. Strategic stability frameworks must protect the decision environment. Relevant measures include minimum decision time requirements, authenticated telemetric lineage, limits on autonomous target nomination, and resilient de-escalation channels.⁴

Recent UN action has placed these concerns on the disarmament agenda. During a September 24, 2025, Security Council debate, Secretary-General António Guterres addressed human control. He stated that decisions on nuclear weapon use must remain with humans, not machines.⁵ On December 1, 2025, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 80/23 on the “Possible risks of the integration of artificial intelligence into command, control and communications systems of nuclear weapons.”⁶ The resolution highlighted risks to human control and decision making. These included information manipulation, miscalculation, misinterpretation, and compressed decision time.

The resolution created political momentum and a shared vocabulary. Its formal provisions, however, did not establish operational standards for system design, interface latency, or verifiable testing. Diplomatic consensus affirms human oversight, in principle, yet the technical baseline for decision-support architecture remains unbuilt. High-level declarations cannot guarantee restraint if command systems still channel operators toward automated conclusions.

Making Human Control Operational

To make human launch authority meaningful, cooperative security agreements must turn a broad political principle into operational safeguards. There are four measures that address the principal ways AI can weaken practical human control: compressed decision time, automated influence over targeting, uncertainty in warning data, and disrupted crisis communication.⁷ Together, these measures shift the debate beyond who formally authorizes nuclear use. These benchmarks ask whether decision systems preserve the ability to question, delay, and reject machine-generated assessments.

Human decision-makers need a protected interval to assess warning data before software ranks nuclear response options. A compressed warning window encourages automation bias, especially under critical time pressure.⁸ Deliberate delay is consequently a safety feature rather than an operational defect.

States should not prescribe an arbitrary universal interval. National political leaders should set the policy requirements, while military commanders, system operators, and human-factors specialists should use crisis simulations to establish scenario-specific minimum decision times.

Operational commands must evaluate how decision-support algorithms interact with human commanders. The interaction should preserve cognitive friction rather than preempt it. Tests should determine whether operators reviewed dissenting indicators and sought disconfirming evidence. Evaluators should also assess whether operators consulted additional authorities and used crisis communication channels. Records of those actions would make national implementation more auditable. International verification would remain difficult, however, requiring agreed procedures for protecting operational information.

Command software should enforce deliberate cognitive gates. These are mandatory review steps that prevent the system from advancing until users examine uncertainty and conflicting evidence. Before ranking a retaliatory option, the interface should require users to examine unvetted telemetry, confidence bounds that show the uncertainty surrounding the system’s estimate, and dissenting sensor streams. The system should record those interactions so later review can distinguish genuine scrutiny from routine approval.

Establishing Limits on Autonomous Target Nomination

Artificial intelligence can process remote telemetry and identify changes in an adversary’s posture. Nuclear command systems, however, should not permit software to generate or rank strike options without defined human input and review. When code prioritizes targets or assembles strike packages, it embeds strategic doctrine. It also encodes risk tolerance in forms that may be difficult to inspect.

National directives should require two-person authorization for changes to targeting logic. The directives should also mandate auditable decision logs and recurring red-team tests of false-positive behavior. Cryptographic or physical separation should isolate sensor-fusion engines from strike-planning modules.

Direct inspection of algorithms would be difficult because source code and targeting doctrine are highly classified. International compliance might instead emphasize declared procedures, controlled demonstrations, and comparable test results. These may cover authorization procedures, agreed test scenarios, false positives, human intervention, and audit logs. Such measures would not eliminate uncertainty, but they can reveal whether states are applying similar safeguards.

States should also test whether cryptographic authentication and tamper-evident logs can confirm that an alert originated from authorized sensor data. The test should not expose sensitive sources or methods. Reliable sensor lineage is essential when warning systems combine commercial and military feeds. Without it, degraded sensors or spoofing by adversaries could appear to confirm an attack. Adversaries may spoof warning systems by transmitting counterfeit signals, altering data in transit, or injecting fabricated observations that make multiple feeds report the same false event.

Carefully designed zero-knowledge techniques may verify compliance without revealing classified data, but their application to early warning remains conceptual. Existing verification research has focused mainly on warhead authentication and protection of classified inspection data.⁹ Adapting those techniques to early warning would require new protocols. Such protocols would need to show compliance with agreed authentication and processing rules without disclosing sensor orbits, resolutions, or sensitive telemetry.

An early warning application should begin as a technical pilot using synthetic data and jointly defined attack scenarios. Its criteria should include resistance to spoofing, protection of classified inputs, and reproducibility across systems. Reviewers should also be able to understand why the system produced a disputed alert.

Building Resilient De-escalation Channels

Existing hotlines should be reinforced with authenticated, redundant procedures for quickly clarifying uncertain or machine-generated warnings. The wider information environment creates severe crisis management risks. Synthetic media, including AI-generated or digitally manipulated audio, video, images, or text can create a “liar’s dividend.”¹⁰ Bots may amplify such content but are distribution mechanisms rather than synthetic media. Officials may dismiss genuine diplomatic messages as fabrications or accept false statements as credible signals of intent.

During the May 2024 U.S.-China bilateral talks on artificial intelligence in Geneva, both governments exchanged views on AI risks and safety.¹¹ That dialogue indicates an emerging recognition of the problem. In November 2024, their presidents also affirmed that humans should retain control over decisions to use nuclear weapons.¹² These political exchanges, however, have not developed into sustained technical cooperation or dedicated nuclear command, control, and communications deconfliction mechanisms. Initial measures can include agreed message templates, scheduled communications tests, and backup channels. Exercises can also train officials to challenge a false or contradictory alert.

Separate talks should address cyber operations against early warning nuclear satellites and ground stations. A comprehensive noninterference agreement would be difficult to verify, but narrower pledges covering specified assets, paired with incident consultations, can still build useful practice.

These safeguards need not begin with a comprehensive treaty. Governments can first clarify doctrine, test human-control procedures, establish audit requirements, and exercise crisis communications. Bilateral or trilateral talks can then identify workable commitments and determine what information can be shared. These discussions can also evaluate credible verification methods. Multilateral forums would be positioned to build on that record where broader norms or legally binding limits become feasible.

The four safeguards need a common test. Each should allow leaders to obtain independent evidence and understand uncertainty. Leaders must also be able to delay a response and reject an automated recommendation without disabling the warning system. That standard distinguishes meaningful human control from a nominal authorization step.

Divergent Incentives for Cooperation

Implementation of any safeguards will require unilateral measures as well as reciprocal commitments. Governments can independently conduct human-factors testing, require audits, and run red-team exercises. National authorities can also establish rules for reviewing machine-generated assessments. Reciprocal commitments will be necessary for protections covering early warning assets, doctrinal exchanges, and crisis-communication exercises. The United States, China, and Russia have different strategic incentives. Negotiations should then begin with measures that protect sensitive data and avoid constraining perceived advantages.

United States: The 2022 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review emphasizes strategic stability, allied assurance, resilience, testing, risk reduction, and verification.¹³ Washington probably would resist verification that would expose classified models, data, or targeting procedures. Negotiations can realistically begin with measures focused on system performance and governance rather than sensitive technical details.

China: U.S. government reporting and independent scholarship describe limited Chinese transparency about nuclear posture.¹⁴ Beijing probably would assess AI safeguards alongside U.S. force posture, missile defenses, and regional strategic capabilities. Dialogue may advance more readily through reciprocal risk-reduction measures than through demands for detailed disclosure.

Russia: The Center for Naval Analyses describes nuclear signaling and escalation management as important elements of Russian strategy.¹⁵ Dmitry Adamsky’s account also supports caution about Moscow’s receptiveness to intrusive Western verification proposals.¹⁶ These preferences may limit cooperation on broad constraints for decision-support systems. Narrow agreements on early warning functions or crisis communications may be more attainable. Attribution and compliance would nevertheless remain difficult.

The four safeguards must also account for systems outside nuclear command. Distributed sensor networks may support conventional intelligence, cyber defense, electronic warfare, precision strike, and strategic warning at the same time. That overlap can blur the line between defensive monitoring and preparations for preemptive attack. Machine speed sensor fusion may then interpret dispersed logistics as offensive staging and elevate an ambiguous pattern into an urgent strategic warning.

Algorithmic entanglement provides a demanding test of meaningful human control. An error or ambiguous event may move across missions through shared data feeds and analytical tools, gaining urgency with each transfer.¹⁷ Protected decision time, data-lineage verification, safeguards for warning assets, and resilient crisis communications must then operate as a connected framework rather than as isolated technical fixes.

Consider one plausible path to accidental escalation. An autonomous underwater vehicle tracking a conventional attack submarine might misclassify it as a ballistic missile submarine. A machine-learning system used for cyber defense might also interpret intelligence collection as preparation for an attack on command nodes. These examples illustrate a narrow risk. A conventional tool can introduce an uncertain but urgent assessment into the strategic warning process before a human operator reviews the evidence.

The central strategic risk reduction question is no longer limited to who authorizes nuclear use. It also includes systems that determine what leaders see and how uncertainty is conveyed. Those systems shape which threats take priority and which responses appear feasible.

Meaningful human control requires more than a human authorization step. Nuclear decision systems must preserve the ability to question, delay, and reject machine generated assessments. Translating this mandate into practice requires states to pilot decision buffers, prohibit automated strike packaging, verify sensor lineage, and exercise secure hotlines. By rooting oversight in national practice and narrow reciprocal steps, human agency becomes auditable rather than assumed.

ENDNOTES

1. David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp. 6-11; Nyla Husain, “September 1983: Soviet officer defies military protocol, averting potential nuclear war,” APS News, September 11, 2026.

2. Hoffman, pp. 6-11; Husain; Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (New York: Times Books, 2012), pp. 35-42.

3. Sylvia Mishra and Philip Reiner, “Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear Command, Control & Communications: A Technical Primer,” Institute for Security and Technology, September 2025.

4. Ibid.

5. António Guterres, “Secretary-General’s remarks to the Security Council Open Debate on Artificial Intelligence and International Peace and Security,” September 24, 2025.

6. UN General Assembly, “Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 1 December 2025,” A/RES/80/23, December 1, 2025.

7. Mishra and Reiner.

8. Michael C. Horowitz and Lauren Kahn, “Bending the Automation Bias Curve: A Study of Human and AI-Based Decision Making in National Security Contexts,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2 (June 2024).

9. Alexander Glaser, Boaz Barak, and Robert J. Goldston, “A zero-knowledge protocol for nuclear warhead verification,” Nature, Vol. 510 (2014): pp. 497-502.

10. Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Daniel S. Schiff, and Natália S. Bueno, “The Liar’s Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability?” American Political Science Review, Vol. 119, No. 1 (February 2025): pp. 71-90.

11. The White House, “Statement from NSC Spokesperson Adrienne Watson on the U.S.-PRC Talks on AI Risk and Safety,” The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, May 14, 2024.

12. The White House, “Readout of President Joe Biden’s Meeting with President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China,” The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, November 16, 2024.

13. U.S. Department of Defense, “2022 National Defense Strategy of The United States of America,” October 2022, p. 8.

14. M. Taylor Fravel, Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy since 1949 (Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 236-42; U.S. Department of Defense, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” 2024 annual report to Congress, December 2024, pp. 102-112, 147-153.

15. Michael Kofman, Anya Fink, and Jeffrey Edmonds, “Russian Strategy for Escalation Management: Evolution of Key Concepts,” CNA, April 13, 2020.

16. Dmitry Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (Stanford University Press, 2019).

17. Vladislav Chernavskikh and Jules Palayer, “Impact of Military Artificial Intelligence on Nuclear Escalation Risk,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security, No. 2025/06 (June 2025).

November 2026
By Daryl G. Kimball

Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump was asked about reports that his counterparts, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, proposed a three-way meeting with Trump to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine at November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in China. 

Trump responded that the talks were “not so much on Ukraine because Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.… We would have it to talk about weapons and denuclearization.”

The statement highlights Trump’s inexcusable enabling behavior toward Putin and his five-year-long illegal assault on the U.S. democratic ally, Ukraine. It shows Trump’s affinity for authoritarians and signals to Putin that he can press on with his vicious missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, infrastructure, and civilians; continue using chemical weapons and cluster munitions on the conflict’s front lines; and try to erase Ukraine as a sovereign state.

Trump’s conduct toward Putin ignores his threats of nuclear weapons use against non-nuclear states that might threaten Russia, undermines European trust in U.S. intentions, and encourages the Kremlin to continue hybrid attacks against NATO members to probe for weaknesses.

Talks on ending the war on Ukraine must involve Ukraine and will only succeed with a tougher U.S. approach to Russia. The United States should advocate for an outcome that ends Russia’s attacks, secures its withdrawal from Ukrainian territory, and creates the opportunity for durable new security arrangements that reduce Russia-NATO tensions.

Meanwhile, denuclearization talks with Russia and China are overdue. As despicable as Putin is, it is in the U.S. and European interest that U.S., Chinese, and Russian diplomats, based on serious preparation and realistic proposals, negotiate, bilaterally or multilaterally, meaningful restraints to halt and reverse the costly, arms race that the states are pursuing in the name of deterring each other’s aggressive and destabilizing behavior.

Unfortunately, the hostile Russian behavior against Ukraine that Trump encourages is the same behavior that his defense establishment cites as the basis for augmenting U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to fight and “prevail” in a future war with Russia in Europe and to counter potential Chinese aggression against Taiwan.

The Pentagon’s latest nuclear strategy review calls for more “credible” options to threaten to use or use tactical nuclear weapons in a regional war. It is an update of the 2018 and 2022 nuclear posture reviews, which declare that Washington might use nuclear weapons first in extreme circumstances in response to non-nuclear strategic attacks against itself or allies and partners.

In response, the National Nuclear Security Administration is moving to design and produce new nuclear weapons faster. Earlier this year, it launched a unified “rapid and advanced capabilities” program for “assessing, designing, prototyping, and demonstrating advanced systems.” The administration has proposed a program budget of $499 million in fiscal year 2027. A separate $100 million “futures program” would develop three new weapons designs, including a modern bunker-buster bomb.

The United States already has at least two types of tactical nuclear weapons in the stockpile: the B61-12 gravity bomb and the W76-2 low-yield warhead for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile. The Navy is also acquiring a new nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile that may be available by the end of the decade.

Nevertheless, as Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Yeaw declared in a speech Oct. 19, “as we modernize our nuclear triad, we will develop additional options to support deterrence and escalation management …[to] ensure the president has expanded decisions space with credible options that are not simply suicide or surrender.” Translation: The United States will be prepared to use nuclear weapons to prevail or try to end a conflict.

The reality is that if nuclear weapons were used in a conflict involving another nuclear-armed adversary, there is no guarantee it will not result in all-out global thermonuclear war.

As McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, and former Arms Control Association Board Members Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard C. Smith wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1982, “The time has come for careful study of the ways and means of moving to a new Alliance policy and doctrine: that nuclear weapons will not be used unless an aggressor should use them first.”

They warned: “It is time to recognize that no one has ever succeeded in advancing any persuasive reason to believe that any use of nuclear weapons, even on the smallest scale, could reliably be expected to remain limited.”

What was true then is also true today: It is in the U.S. and global interest for nuclear-armed states to rule out the first use of nuclear weapons in any conflict, severely minimize their nuclear arsenals, and negotiate verifiable agreements that move us toward a world without nuclear weapons.

After six years in office, however, Trump is failing on “denuclearization” diplomacy. Instead, he is “renuclearizing.” Congress can help effect a course correction by canceling the Trump administration’s dangerous plan for new tactical nuclear weapons and pressing Trump to engage in serious, balanced, and sustained talks on strategic and sub-strategic nuclear arms control with Russia and China. 

November 2026
By U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. (Ret.) John “Jack” Shanahan

Lt. Gen. John “Jack” N.T. Shanahan, who retired in 2020 after a 36-year military career in the U.S. Air Force, served as inaugural director of the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Previously, he established and led the department's first operational AI program, charged with bringing AI capabilities to intelligence collection and analysis. His remarks at an event sponsored by the Arms Control Association, Sept. 11, 2026, at The National Press Club have been lightly edited.

Those developments should give us even greater pause about how quickly these technologies will be integrated—not just across the nuclear enterprise itself, but throughout the conventional decision-support systems, command-and-control systems, and ISR platforms that shape the information environment surrounding nuclear decision-making.

If you take away one message from my brief remarks today, I hope it is this: The most consequential AI risks to nuclear operations may not come from giving AI direct authority over nuclear weapons. They may instead arise from AI influencing, distorting, or corrupting the information environment; accelerating decision cycles; shaping what commanders believe to be true; narrowing or expanding the options they consider and increasingly, with agentic AI, taking actions in the world on our behalf.

When I wrote the Arms Control Today piece last year, my goal was to move beyond the high-level debates about the direct intersection of AI and nuclear weapons. Many of those arguments are intellectually formidable, and I don’t mean to diminish them.

My concern was—and remains—that they can obscure a much more complicated set of interactions within the nuclear enterprise and, just as importantly, outside it. Those interactions are not well understood today, and they will become even more difficult to untangle as AI capabilities advance and diffuse across all-domain military operations.

The 2024 Biden-Xi agreement that humans should retain control over nuclear-use decisions was an important starting point. Perhaps the upcoming [September 25] Trump-Xi meeting will begin the harder work of translating that principle into concrete risk-reduction measures.

I began my Arms Control Today piece by clarifying the distinction between NC2 and NC3 [nuclear command and control/nuclear command, control, and communications]. That distinction might seem unnecessary or even pedantic, especially when talking with representatives of other nuclear nations, none of whom organize their nuclear decision-making processes exactly as we do. That was fair criticism before. Much less so today.

The introduction of frontier AI models makes the distinction between nuclear command and control [NC2]—doctrinally, the exercise of authority and direction over assigned and attached nuclear forces—and nuclear command, control, and communications [NC3]—the integrated hardware and software systems that enable that command and control—more important than ever. Why? Because highly advanced AI can affect both, in very different ways.

Frontier models increase the familiar risk of automation bias—humans placing undue confidence in machine outputs. But they also introduce something more insidious and potentially more dangerous: the risks of “epistemic capture.” I’ll return to that shortly.

In the article, I also discussed AI’s potential effects on strategic stability— both benefits and risks. Many other experts have done excellent work on this subject, so I will make only one point here. For me, on balance, the risks associated with dramatically accelerating nuclear decision timelines or reducing meaningful human involvement in launch decisions and execution are likely to outweigh the benefits.

I then identified four compounding and interconnected areas that demand urgent attention by all nuclear states if we are to reduce the risk of unintended or mistaken nuclear use.

First, cascading effects and emergent behaviors. Even seemingly minor errors can propagate across interconnected platforms and decision-support systems, producing consequences far out of proportion to the original failure— especially as multiple AI models become embedded throughout those systems.

Second, even if AI is carefully controlled within the formal NC2 and NC3 enterprise, its use in adjacent systems is inevitable. AI will increasingly be embedded in ISR sensors, conventional weapon systems, information networks, and decision-support systems—all of which can indirectly shape nuclear decision-making.

That is unavoidable. And we still understand remarkably little about what those interactions will mean in practice. We should not pretend otherwise.

Closely related is the problem of … two different forms of entanglement: the growing interdependence of commercial and military technologies, and the longstanding but increasingly complicated entanglement of conventional and nuclear systems.

In the age of AI, I am convinced that complete disentanglement is unrealistic…. The challenge, therefore, is not to wish these interdependencies away. It is to understand their second- and third-order effects, and to develop technical, policy, and procedural measures that reduce the risks they create.

Third, the introduction of large language models may seem distant from the nuclear enterprise, yet I would argue that these models pose a more immediate— and underestimated—risk…. Finally, agentic AI is one of the fastest-moving areas in AI research and commercial industry today. The introduction of AI agents into any part of the nuclear ecosystem is—to make the understatement of the year—fraught.

Agents can pursue objectives over extended periods, use tools, interact with other systems, maintain context or memory, observe the results of their actions, and adapt their plans as circumstances change. As their capabilities increase, those characteristics create the potential for behavior that becomes increasingly difficult to predict, monitor, or interrupt—and that can depart significantly from what designers or operators intended.

If we move down this path too quickly, we risk learning the hard way that it is much easier to tell an agentic system what we want it to accomplish than to specify everything we do not want it to do in pursuit of that objective… .

That is precisely the kind of unexpected behavior we cannot afford in the nuclear enterprise.

I concluded my Arms Control Today piece by acknowledging that in many instances, AI may add clear value with minimal risk. I’m genuinely optimistic about its potential to improve nuclear weapon surety and warhead design, enhance intelligence analysis, strengthen security, support verification regimes, and accelerate scientific discovery, among other benefits.

But rigorous analysis—including advanced modeling and simulation and wargaming—may also reveal cases where the cumulative effects of AI integration create risks so consequential that guardrails, other proactive measures, or even outright prohibitions are warranted to reduce the possibility of an erroneous nuclear launch.

I want to return to how frontier models could affect the nuclear decision-making process… which ventures well beyond automation bias: epistemic capture. The term itself is not new, of course, but I had not seen it applied specifically to frontier AI models in a military decision-making context.

Epistemic capture occurs when an AI system’s representation of reality becomes so dominant that the human can no longer recognize it merely as a representation—can no longer effectively challenge it, generate alternatives, cross-check it, recognize its failure modes, or act contrary to it.

In the nuclear setting, epistemic capture could have far-reaching, even catastrophic consequences. AI will increasingly shape not only what and how we observe the world around us but also how advanced frontier models mediate our orientation to that world: how information is synthesized, what patterns are highlighted, which explanations appear most plausible, and ultimately which courses of action seem available or reasonable.

At the same time, we’re seeing increasingly compelling experimental evidence that surprisingly small amounts of deliberately manipulated data can poison language models or skew their behavior. That introduces an adversarial dimension to this problem. We have every reason to expect that adversaries will look for ways to manipulate the data, context, or information sources feeding AI systems to shape their outputs—and potentially influence U.S. nuclear decision-making in ways that may be extremely difficult to recognize or counter.

At some point, we must ask: are we operating in the real world, or in an AI model’s representation of the real world?

And if we fail to recognize how profoundly that representation is shaping our understanding, the risk of flawed decision-making grows accordingly.

In the nuclear environment, that is a massive problem. Automation bias affects what we accept. Epistemic capture affects what we are even capable of considering in the first place.

I want to turn to one final dimension of how AI could affect human decision-making, beyond automation bias and epistemic capture.

For years, I argued that one of AI’s most valuable contributions in the military would be its ability to give time back to humans making consequential decisions. Today, I stand on much shakier ground with that assertion.

Military organizations place an enormous premium on decision speed and operational tempo. If AI gives decision-makers more time, there is no guarantee they will use that time to deliberate more carefully. They may instead use it to make more decisions.

Herb Lin suggested to me that this might be understood as a version of the Jevons paradox. As AI makes the production of decisions more efficient—reducing the time and effort required for each one—we may respond by increasing decision throughput rather than banking the time and using it to improve the quality of the decisions that really matter.

That by itself was intriguing. But Herb made another observation I found equally salient: the institutional premium on making a better decision may not be nearly as great as the premium on making more decisions, and doing so faster. That has profound implications for nuclear decision-making.

We should be using the time AI gives back to humans to improve the quality of consequential decisions—to apply judgment, causal reasoning, common sense, wisdom, and rich contextual understanding. More is not necessarily better, especially in the nuclear context. The danger is not just faster decisions. It is unnecessary decisions.

And there is one final complication. The problem does not stop at the boundary of the nuclear command-and-control enterprise.

In a [recent] Substack post …, Ankit Panda raised an intriguing—and unsettling—possibility: an autonomous AI agent could become a third-party catalyst in a nuclear crisis without ever gaining access to a nuclear weapon or an NC3 network.

It could fabricate intelligence, spoof communications, conduct cyber operations that create attribution problems, manipulate human actors, or manufacture other conditions that increase the risk of escalation. Ankit’s larger point is that the catalytic third party in a nuclear crisis need no longer be another state, a terrorist organization, or some other group of humans. It could conceivably be an autonomous AI system.

The danger, in other words, may not be that the machine makes the nuclear decision. It may be that the machine changes the reality within which humans believe they are making that decision.

In closing, when it comes to AI and nuclear weapons, it is entirely possible that we get the obvious pieces right—maintaining human control, protecting decision authority, managing entanglement—and still miss something downstream. Something subtle. Something that emerges only once these systems begin interacting in ways we do not yet fully understand, or through the insidious effects of epistemic capture.

For the most consequential nuclear-relevant applications, the burden of evidence should rest with those proposing deployment to demonstrate why the system is sufficiently safe, reliable, and controllable to justify the risk.

Some of you may remember a report former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig wrote for the Center for a New American Security in 2018, titled Technology Roulette. Richard was characteristically prescient. He warned that complex, opaque, novel, and interactive technologies would inevitably produce accidents, emergent effects, and loss of control.

When it comes to AI and nuclear weapons, we are playing technology roulette. As the technology becomes more capable, more interconnected, and more deeply embedded in military systems, we keep adding green zeros to the roulette wheel—steadily increasing the odds that eventually something lands where we never expected it to. And if that happens, it’s not that the house wins and the players lose. Everyone at the table loses. When it comes to AI and nuclear weapons, we will never eliminate uncertainty. That’s not possible. But we can bound it. We can slow the clock.

And we can reduce the risk that AI—introduced for advantage—becomes instead a source of catastrophic miscalculation.

November 2026
By Daryl G. Kimball

Officials representing the five nuclear-armed members of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) met in New York the week of Oct. 5 for the latest “P5 process” consultation aimed at increasing mutual understanding of one another’s nuclear doctrines and postures, multiple diplomats told Arms Control Today on condition of anonymity.

Since 2010, the P5 process dialogue has involved informal discussion among senior nuclear policy officials of the five states, sometimes at the level of undersecretary or deputy minister, sometimes at the lower technical-expert level. The sessions have only been held infrequently and never at the level of heads of state. Many experts say that this format is insufficient to deal with intensifying nuclear weapons challenges.

The French foreign minister, whose country currently chairs the P5 process, announced April 27 at the 2026 NPT Review Conference that the five nuclear-armed states this year would be urged to discuss “measures to reduce strategic risks, a moratorium on the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, the entry into force of the comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty, [and] the launch of discussions on strategic stability with a view to establishing a new security framework in the future.”

To date, none of the five governments has publicly described the content or outcomes from the latest P5 process dialogue, which took place on the fringes of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly’s First Committee on Disarmament and International Security.

Ahead of the P5 process meetings, however, U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal Sept. 24 that the Trump administration has been quietly holding talks with China about its rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal and U.S. allegations that Beijing conducted a 10-ton nuclear explosion in June 2020. That event, if confirmed as a nuclear explosion, would be a violation of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). (See ACT, March 2026.)

A separate CNN report published Oct. 6 said that the Trump administration had discussed beginning “reciprocal nuclear [test] site visits with China” and that China had proposed reciprocal visits of Chinese and U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories.

U.S. officials have supported a proposal announced by French officials May 1 to seek talks on confidence building measures, which may or may not require or involve reciprocal site visits. Senior Chinese officials who spoke with Arms Control Today Oct. 9 denied they had proposed reciprocal visits as CNN reported.

Echoing a proposal made in 2023 by the head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States proposed May 1 that the P5 process states engage in multilateral strategic stability talks on “confidence-building measures regarding nuclear explosive test monitoring, including increasing the ability to detect tests of any yield toward ensuring nuclear weapons states adhere to [the] zero-yield standard” established by the CTBT.

The prospects for such talks are murky, however, in the wake of what was described by several diplomatic observers as a “confrontational” presentation by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation Christopher Yeaw at a public side-event sponsored Oct. 8 by the U.S. delegation at the UN.

In announcing the event, the U.S. Mission to the UN claimed that, “The world has been hoodwinked into believing that an actual norm against nuclear testing exists, when in fact it’s an illusion created by an unverifiable treaty.” The CTBT has 188 state signatories, including the United States.

In his remarks and presentation slides obtained by Arms Control Today, Yeaw repeated the U.S. charge that China conducted a yield-producing nuclear test in June 2020. He also reaffirmed a contested 2019 U.S. assessment that Russia has conducted secret nuclear tests in the past that could help advance Russian nonstrategic nuclear capabilities.

Yeaw argued that the CTBT verification regime is not fit for purpose if the objective is to verify compliance with the strict zero-yield test standard. He acknowledged that the five nuclear-armed states all agreed during the CTBT negotiations that the treaty prohibits any “any test explosion that produces a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.”

Yeaw called the present situation regarding testing “unacceptable,” and he reiterated President Donald Trump’s threat that the United States would respond “on an equal basis” if alleged low-yield nuclear testing by other states continues. But Yeaw also said the United States prefers to address its concerns through diplomatic and multilateral channels.

In remarks at the UN First Committee Oct. 8-9, Chinese and Russian officials strenuously rejected allegations that they have violated the CTBT and called upon the United States to finally ratify the treaty to help bring it into force. That is necessary to facilitate short-notice, on-site inspections to detect and deter any clandestine, low-yield nuclear testing.

Meanwhile, Mexico and 176 states voted in favor of a resolution at the UN First Committee in mid-October that in part, “urges all States to refrain from any action that may hamper progress towards the entry into force of the Treaty and its universalization.” The resolution also “urges all states not to carry out nuclear-weapon test explosions or any other nuclear explosions, to maintain their moratoriums in this regard and to refrain from acts that would defeat the object and purpose of the Treaty.” The United States voted no.

In an Oct. 15 interview with Newsmax, Trump claimed he is holding talks with Russia and China “about that denuclearization.” The following day, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said: “It is neither fair, reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage.”

On Oct. 19, in response to reports that Trump is open to a meeting proposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine at the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, the U.S. leader told reporters the talks were “not so much on Ukraine because Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine, they haven’t been doing much, and the same with China.”

“We would have it to talk about weapons and denuclearization. If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it,” Trump added.

After the Trump administration rejected Russia’s proposal that the United States and Russia continue to respect the central limits of the now expired New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, it said it would seek a “new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” (See ACT, March 2026.) The administration has not explained what Trump would seek to achieve through such a dialogue, nor publicly outlined any arms control proposals.

However, in remarks Oct. 20 at the Reagan Presidential Library in California, Yeaw claimed that “Russia and China have expressed initial signs of openness to engage in strategic stability and arms control discussions, which we hope will lead to more intensive engagements and eventually a better arms control agreement than what has come before.”

“We’ve made clear that the United States is open to discussion with other nuclear states on strategic stability in arms control, and that there are no preconceived notions, no preconditions. In short, our door is open,” Yeaw said.