Grand Strategy - Nuclear Security Program Conference

September 13, 2024
Humanities Quadrangle, Room 136
Yale University
New Haven, CT

Participants:

Oleksii Antoniuk is a Yale '24 alum and a Nuclear Security Program Fellow. After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in Economics this May, he came back home to Ukraine. 

Oleksii is currently working in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, where he leads the Strategic Institute for Unmanned Systems (SIUS). As the head of SIUS, he manages the collection and analysis of tactical battlefield data and attempts to predict the battlefield role of unmanned systems in the medium term in order to out-innovate the enemy. Oleksii is also training to become an artillery officer in the Ukrainian military. 

At Yale, Oleksii led the Alexander Hamilton Society (AHS), a national security student organization dedicated to promoting the US's active role on the world stage and building a platform for rigorous foreign policy discourse on campus. During his education in the US, he spent multiple summers in Washington, DC, working with the Institute for the Study of War, the US Congress, and the International Republican Institute.

Dr. Tyler Bowen is an Assistant Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department at the United States Naval War College. His book project, The Liftable Stick: How Conventional Coercion Succeeds in Nuclear Crises, focuses on the role of conventional military superiority in nuclear crisis bargaining. His broader research agenda focuses on how issues of nuclear deterrence and nuclear weapons strategy interact with U.S. grand strategy. He also researches how nuclear weapons affect public attitudes towards the use of force. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale in 2021. Previously, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kissinger Center at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 2021-2022, and he was the Stanton Visiting Scientist at the United States Air Force Academy in 2022-2023.

Samuel Bowles is a senior in Timothy Dwight studying Global Affairs and History. He was born in New York to Bolivian parents and lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil for 10 years. At Yale, Samuel is focused on US foreign policy and the role of Latin America in shaping US grand strategy. To this end, he worked as a research assistant studying Brazilian mayoral elections and a government affairs consultant for the firm National Journal. He hopes to work on US national security issues after graduating, particularly in South America. In his free time, Sam enjoys watching football (soccer) and playing tennis.

Michael Brenes is Co-Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History at Yale University. His research focuses on U.S. foreign policy, political history, and political economy. He is the author of For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy (2020) and co-editor of Rethinking U.S. Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations (2024). His forthcoming book, co-authored with Van Jackson, is The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (2025). His work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and other major publications. He is also writing a history of the War on Terror and finalizing a volume on Cold War liberalism.

Emmanuelle Brindamour is a Nuclear Security Program Summer Fellow and senior undergraduate student at Yale College studying Statistics & Data Science. Emmanuelle's work uses geospatial data analysis and satellite imagery to examine the status and implications of foreign-owned energy projects in Africa. Since partnering with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency's (NGA) open-source team in 2023, she has focused on Russian activity in North Africa's oil, gas, and nuclear energy industries in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Her work has been published by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and Modern War Institute. In tandem with her geospatial studies, Emmanuelle also conducts research in machine learning at Yale to automate geospatial labelling processes. Previously, she developed planetary simulations with the SouthWest Research Institute towards the NASA Veritas mission to Venus.

Tony Cai is a fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs’ Nuclear Security Program, part of International Security Studies. As a rising sophomore at Yale University, Cai is working toward a B.A. in Global Affairs and a B.S. in Computer Science. Originally from Xiamen, China – an island city on the Taiwan Strait – Cai has long been interested in the nexus of international conflict, history, military affairs, and culture. Cai’s research has examined the intertwined dynamics of public opinion, policy-making, and propaganda, exploring how a nation’s self-perception shapes its historical narrative. 

Currently, Cai is working with universities in mainland China to design a series of courses focused on nuclear politics, including nuclear safeguards and arms control. He aims to explore the effects of China’s domestic political evolution on its nuclear strategy; he also seeks to understand the intersection of Beijing’s newfound emphasis on public awareness of nuclear weapons with its agenda as a nuclear superpower. 

Cai speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese Hokkien, English, and Spanish.

Susan Colbourn is associate director of the Program in American Grand Strategy and associate research professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is the author of Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell University Press, 2022). At present, she is writing an international history of NATO from its founding to the present.

Fiona Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a Faculty Fellow at Perry World House and affiliated with the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics. Her research focuses on technology and conflict, particularly how China uses space weapons, cyber attacks, and conventional missiles as substitutes for nuclear threats. Fiona’s work has been published in International Security, Security Studies, and other journals, and featured in the New York Times and The Economist. Her research has received support from the Stanton Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and the China Confucius Studies Program. She has held fellowships at institutions including Renmin University of China, the Belfer Center at Harvard, and the Carnegie Endowment. Fiona earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT in 2018 and holds a B.A. from the University of New South Wales and a B.Laws from the University of Sydney. She was previously an Assistant Professor at George Washington University.

Jane Darby Menton is a Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Director of the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference. Her research focuses on arms control and nonproliferation, with an emphasis on Iran and East Asia. She was previously a research scholar at UC Berkeley’s Risk and Security Lab and served as deputy director of the UC Berkeley Nuclear Policy Working Group. Jane Darby’s work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Lawfare, and CNN. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, an MPhil from the University of Oxford, and a BA from Yale University.

Alexandre Debs is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where he is also the Faculty Director of the Nuclear Security Program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Alexandre’s research focuses on the causes of war, nuclear proliferation, and democratization. His work has appeared in such outlets as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, International Organization, and International Security. He is the author of the book Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (with Nuno Monteiro), published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Alexandre received a Ph.D. degree in Economics from M.I.T., an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and a B.Sc. in Economics and Mathematics from Universite de Montreal.

Tyler Duchynski is a senior from Santa Rosa, California majoring in History with certificates in Russian and Statistics and Data Science. His research with the Brady-Johnson Program on Grand Strategy focused on the strategic future of the NATO alliance and the challenges of transatlantic coordination and coalition-building. Tyler is also passionate about exploring the intersection between the foreign policies of Russia and other states in the post-Soviet space and the historical memory of their populations. On campus, Tyler heads the Yale Military History Society and is president of the Yale Undergraduate Tabletop Association. Professionally, he has experience working across the U.S. government, including the Department of State, Department of Defense, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the California State Assembly

Dr. Michael Goldfien's research focuses on leadership and the politics of diplomacy at the international and domestic levels. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Security Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Journal of Politics, among other outlets. He has been a fellow with the International Security Studies program at Yale, the Yale Nuclear Security Program, and the Hans J. Morgenthau Fellowship at the Notre Dame International Security Center. He holds a Ph.D. in political science with distinction from Yale University, an M.A. in international policy from Stanford University, and a B.A. in international relations from Grinnell College.

Salvador Gómez-Colón, a history major in Yale's Ezra Stiles College, was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Following Hurricane María in 2017, he led disaster-relief missions that reached thousands of households and advocated for climate resilience at global forums like the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Aspen Institute, and UN agencies. Salvador has worked on issues of climate and security at the White House, UNDP, and the State Department. As chairman of the Nicholas J. Spykman Fellowship, he led student discussions on foreign policy and was a leader in the Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative, a joint Yale-West Point initiative focused on the Middle East. As a Presidential Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, he researched energy independence during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Salvador is also the author of Hurricane: My Story of Resilience (Norton Young Readers, 2021).

Stephen Herzog is a Fellow of the Yale Nuclear Security Program. A Ph.D. graduate in Political Science from Yale, he is Professor of Practice at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) of the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey. Stephen co-chairs the Beyond Nuclear Deterrence Working Group, an initiative of the MacArthur Foundation and Harvard University’s Project on Managing the Atom. Previously, Stephen was a Senior Researcher in Nuclear Arms Control at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before returning to academia, he held positions with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the Federation of American Scientists. He has worked, researched, and traveled in over 100 countries. Stephen’s research is published in Contemporary Security Policy, Energy Research & Social Science, International Security, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, The Journal of Politics, the Naval War College Review, The Nonproliferation Review, and Survival. His commentary has been featured in Arms Control Today, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Financial Times, Science, The National Interest, War on the Rocks, and The Washington Post.

Fahd Humayun is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. This year he is also a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). His research, which traces the domestic sources of interstate conflict, has been published in the Journal of Peace Research and International Studies Quarterly. He is currently working on a book project that investigates why democratic governments initially chart courses with interstate rivals that run counter to their pre-office foreign policy rhetoric, using case studies of Israel, India, South Korea and the United States. His research has been supported by the Stanton Foundation, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, International Security Studies, and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2022. He also holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge.

Conor Hodges is a joint Ph.D. student in the Departments of History and African American Studies. His research treats the relationship between modern United States military and law enforcement institutions with attention to transnational dynamics of race and (de)colonization. Originally from Orlando, Florida, Conor served in the U.S. Army as a combat medic before graduating from Cornell University as a College Scholar. At Yale he is co-convener of the Racial Capitalism and the Carceral State Working Group, articles editor for the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, and legislative history researcher for Yale Law School’s Challenging Racism in the Law Clinic. Beyond Yale, Conor serves as a trustee of the Telluride Association and as Racial Justice in Public Safety Fellow at Cornell. His project for this conference treats the role of Cold War defense intellectuals versed in nuclear strategic deterrence in reinvigorating domestic criminological deterrence.

Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at CNAS, focusing on U.S. and European national security challenges related to Russia, authoritarianism, and the transatlantic alliance. She previously served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council and as a senior analyst at the CIA. Kendall-Taylor is also a Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Her work has appeared in journals and media outlets such as Foreign Affairs and The Washington Post. She holds a BA from Princeton University and a PhD from UCLA.

Dr. Jiyoung Ko is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University. Her research interests include nationalism, nuclear deterrence, alliance politics, and public opinion. She is the author of Popular Nationalism and War (Oxford University Press, 2023). Her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, International Interactions, Foreign Policy Analysis, and Contemporary Security Policy. She was a U.S.-Korea NextGen Scholar (2018-2019) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center. She is a Nuclear Security Fellow at Yale University (2023-) and a visiting scholar at the Belfer Center at Harvard University (2024 Fall-). She is an organizer of the Pacific International Politics Conference (PIPC) Online Speaker Series, and an associate editor at International Relations of the Asia Pacific. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Korea University and Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.

Dilan Koç is an Analyst at NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Belgium. Previously, she worked within the Defence Policy and Planning and the Innovation, Hybrid, and Cyber Divisions at NATO Headquarters. She holds a master’s degree from Yale University.

Pranav Pattatathunaduvil is a senior majoring in Global Affairs and Co-President of Yale AHS. He is deeply interested in Indo-Pacific geopolitics, particularly US-India relations and US-China tech competition, areas he explored through internships at the State Department, Hudson Institute, and Special Competitive Studies Project. He co-founded and co-directs the Geopolitics of Technology Initiative and led the 2024 Geopolitics of Technology Forum in DC. Pranav is a Doug Beck Fellow and a recipient of the 2020 Coolidge Scholarship. He will complete his MPP in Global Affairs from the Yale Jackson School in 2026.

Melissa Pavlik is a doctoral candidate in political science at Yale University. Her research focuses on political violence and modes of state repression, especially of minority and migrant populations. One strand of her research agenda concerns how state actors frame coercive policy actions to prospective audiences. Prior to Yale, Mel earned degrees in Political Science and Statistics from University of Chicago, and in War Studies from King's College London.

Ryan Pike is a doctoral candidate in political science at Yale University. His research focuses on climate and energy politics in advanced industrialized democracies. Within this broader focus, he is interested in how actors use social media to influence the public on issues such as the green transition, energy politics, and foreign policy. Prior to Yale, Ryan earned his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara and worked in Spain for several years.

Bárbara Cruvinel Santiago is the Dean of Berkeley College at Yale University, where she also teaches undergraduate courses. She holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University, where she researched astronomical instrumentation with the support from a NASA fellowship. During her doctoral studies, she became one of the inaugural fellows of the Physicists’ Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction and received the American Physical Society Five Sigma Physicist prize for outstanding advocacy. After Columbia, Dr. Cruvinel Santiago spent one year as a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation studying how to reduce the risk of nuclear weaponization of dual-purpose scientific research. Prior to her Ph.D., she got a B.S. in Physics from Yale and spent a year as a research assistant at MIT’s Nobel-prize-winning LIGO lab.

Odd Arne Westad is a scholar of modern international and global history, specializing in East Asia since the 18th century. Originally from Ålesund, Norway, he studied at the University of Oslo and completed a graduate degree in U.S./international history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Westad has published 16 books, focusing on 20th-century Asian and global history. 

His early work addressed the Cold War, China-Russia relations, and the Chinese civil war, including Cold War and Revolution and Decisive Encounters. Since the mid-2000s, his research has expanded to postcolonial and global history, with key works such as The Global Cold War, Restless Empire, and The Cold War: A World History. He is currently exploring histories of empire and imperialism, particularly in Asia, and the impact of China’s late 20th-century economic reforms. 

Westad joined Yale’s faculty after teaching at the London School of Economics and Harvard University. At Yale, he teaches in the History Department and at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, advises Davenport College, and directs the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and co-directs the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy. He is a fellow of the British Academy and other national academies, a visiting professor at Peking University, and a research associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center.

The Nuclear Security Program is a new research initiative of International Security Studies. It is generously sponsored by the Stanton Foundation

The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University is a distinguished initiative focused on the interdisciplinary study of statecraft, leadership, and strategic decision-making in historical and contemporary contexts. By engaging faculty from across disciplines such as history, political science, and international relations, the program prepares students to address complex global challenges. It offers a robust curriculum, student fellowships, and practitioner engagements, while also hosting conferences, workshops, and public lectures that foster critical discussions on grand strategy. The program's comprehensive approach equips future leaders with the tools to shape policy and navigate international affairs effectively, contributing significantly to the intellectual life of Yale.

Jackson School of Global Affairs Founded with a transformational gift from John (’67) and Susan Jackson, the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs offers interdisciplinary academic programs that inspire and prepare Yale students for global leadership and service. Prior to becoming a standalone professional school in 2022, the Jackson School was known as the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.