Strategic Simplicity Podcast

We take our conversation about ‘role’ and ‘reliance’ into a second podcast, where we share our opinions of Tyler Bowen’s May 15, 2026 article in War on the Rocks: “ Restrain and Hedge: A New U.S. Nuclear Strategy for a Two-Peer World .” In his article, Tyler Argues for a U.S. strategy that deemphasizes damage limitation as an embrace of “nuclear restraint.” Instead, he proposes that the United Sta...

We rarely take liberties as co-hosts to talk about arcane and didactic international security subject matter. Or perhaps we do that every episode. At least we usually don’t spend a lot of time engaging in definitional combat. Austin, Matthew, Vipin, and I tried to do a little bit of that in Part I of this episode where we discussed the role of nuclear weapons vs. reliance on (or, because of Vipin,...

The gang got together this weekend to talk about a new Stimson Center report, “Why Strategic Superiority (Still) Doesn’t Matter: Nuclear Crises and the Failure of Theory.“ The new report by Chris Preble, Senior Fellow and Director of the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, and Lucas Ruiz, a recent Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow in the same program, analyzes the role nuc...

NTI’s Eric Brewer joins us to unpack how Iran’s nuclear program has transformed since the JCPOA era — and what that means for any future nuclear agreement, which we acknowledge may be quite far off. We talk about Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, the lack of IAEA access, new underground facilities, and years of experience with advanced centrifuges, and how these changes create a fundamentally...

The Strategic Simplicity crew was at full strength for the first time in a month, and joined by Astrid Chevreuil to discuss French President Emmanuel Macron’s highly anticipated speech on nuclear doctrine on March 2nd. Astrid is a Visiting Fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. She is a career diplomat wit...

Austin, Matthew, Vipin, and I discuss New START expiration, new information revealed by the U.S. government regarding PRC nuclear test activities, and ideas for U.S. arms control policy efforts moving forward after the government’s rollout of post-New START priorities last Friday. Under Secretary of State Dinanno’s speech before the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva ( link ) National Academie...

To close out (for now…) our three part series on New START and its pending expiration, Rebeccah Heinrichs and Frank Miller join Vipin, Austin, and I to explain why they think the United States should let the agreement expire without a continuation of the central numerical limits, as Russia has proposed. Our conversation touched upon Russia’s behavior in implementing the treaty, compliance record,...

Arms control diplomacy is, like many other areas of government policy-making, hard to understand without experiencing directly. How defense strategy, political science, technology, and area studies combine with personalities, time pressure, and interagency tensions is difficult to describe - but these elements collide together in a highly concentrated fashion during an arms control negotiation. Gr...

Rose and I covered the landscape related to New START and more: * Her experience as chief negotiator - managing Russian interlocutors, an interagency delegation in Geneva as well as the one back home, * the role of the President and other very senior officials in arms control negotiations, * New START and “reset” politics, * why “drive by” negotiations stink, * Putin’s offer to keep New START limi...

Before the holiday break, Vipin contributed a new post to the Strategic Stability Substack (I know, two in one year, how can he keep up this lightning pace) titled “Four Shibboleths of Nuclear Strategy.” In the post, Vipin asks whether we should take for granted four strong, consistent ideas that appear in nuclear policy debates: (1) strategic stability is “good,” (2) arms races are “bad,” (3) esc...

Charlie Glaser joins the podcast to discuss his new book, “Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America’s Future Against a Rising China.” We talked about his recommendations for U.S.-China policy, including his case for ending U.S. security commitments to Taiwan (though not ending peacetime security assistance) to reduce the potential for a destructive war with China, while strengthening it’s relat...

Heather and I discussed the 2025 CSIS PONI Project Atom Report, entitled “Escalation Management in Acute and Protracted Conflicts in the Indo-Pacific.“ Project Atom brings several authors together to propose alternative strategies for managing escalation with China. Authors provided submissions examining diplomatic risk management, conventional deterrence, regional nuclear deterrence, allies persp...

I was really lucky to have Tong Zhao, a Senior Fellow with the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, spend his late Friday afternoon with me to walk through the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs new white paper on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. Our discussion spanned nuclear doctrine, posture shifts, multilateral arms control, and advice for early career professionals inter...

We finally pulled our thoughts together on the President’s recent comments regarding nuclear testing, in light of a steady drip of additional information from congress, other U.S. officials, as well as the media. After analyzing what this testing discussion is all about, we opened the mailbag to try and get through a few listener questions. In lieu of a longer summary of the podcast, I’m sharing s...

During our last conversation on U.S. nuclear strategy (about two weeks ago, primarily led by Austin Long and Charlie Glaser who have spent quite a bit of time debating damage limitation), we uncovered a few questions we just didn’t have time to address. We chose three specific questions to discuss on today’s pod, and of course, we uncovered enough interesting material to start planning a Part 3: *...

For those of you who haven’t met Charlie Glaser, he’s truly a great contributor to nuclear policy discussions and a wonderful colleague. And we were happy to host Charlie for a discussion on damage limitation. Charlie is a prolific author on U.S. nuclear strategy and broader international security topics, having written on the infeasibility of counterforce as China’s arsenal grows, U.S. commitment...

Austin, Vipin, and I sat down to share our reviews of Kathryn Bigelow’s new Netflix thriller, “A House of Dynamite.” We share our analysis of the film’s plot; where the film seemed accurate in its portrayal of the nuclear war scenario, deterrence logic, basic facts of government operations; and, some of the more confusing assertions made by characters in the film. Lot’s of feelings! But we also tr...

Austin, Vipin and I welcome friends from the MIT Security Studies Program, Taylor Fravel and Caitlin Talmadge, to discuss China once again. This time, we focus on two oft-cited rationales for China’s nuclear build-up—the desire to improve the survivability of its nuclear forces, and the potential to use a larger nuclear forces as a fullback for regional coercion/aggression. Our guests help explain...

Is Putin’s offer to continue adherence to New START central limits for one more year a “cost free virtue signal,” a sincere desire to manage nuclear competition, an opening to a broader conversation on strategic issues, or maybe a combination of all of these things. Additionally, what U.S. interests are at play in considering this offer? Austin and I had a great conversation with two of the top ex...

Toby Dalton, Francesca Giovannini, and Eric Brewer, experts and leaders with the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, Harvard University Belfer Center Initiative on Managing the Atom, and Nuclear Threat Initiative, staffed the Task Force on Nuclear Proliferation and U.S. National Security for the past 10 months. They recently drafted and published a final task force report entitled “ Prevent...

Ankit, Vipin, and I discussed U.S.-ROK-DPRK affairs after recent comments by President Lee at the U.N. General Assembly, the ROK’s “E.N.D.” policy rollout, U.S. immigration and trade actions, and DPRK activities. Ankit and Vipin recently traveled to Seoul and shared insights gained during their trip on the state of extended deterrence discussions between the United States and South Korea, as well...

One of the most rewarding aspects of government service is the opportunity to meet amazing, highly qualified and well-respected experts and leaders, and work alongside them in some of the most stressful circumstances. Celeste Wallander is one of those expert-leaders to these three nuclear musketeers (Team Title WIP, and no, this isn’t a new nuclear weapon idea that Austin came up with.). She is cu...

Tom Karako, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, shares his new paper on the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), entitled “A Marie Kondo Moment for MTCR: Tidying Up the U.S. Approach to Missile Proliferation.“ Tom recommends that the U.S. government find a way to overcome the “strong presumption of denial” at the core of MTCR in order to better develop allied and...

Austin, Vipin and I welcomed Taylor Fravel and Caitlin Talmadge to the Strategic Simplicity Podcast to talk about China. While I was hoping we would could make this THE definitive China episode, we realized as the conversation began just how much more we have to unpack and explore on this topic. Stay tuned for a Part II (and maybe a Part III!) in the coming weeks. Our podcast covered some of the h...

Austin, Vipin, and I suspended our unilateralist approach to choosing podcast topics for one recording session, instead taking on questions and comments that you listeners/readers sent to us. Thank you for being willing to engage, on pretty short notice, on a wide array of topics. We will definitely do this again, so please keep sending in your thoughts! I’m not going to list every question we rec...