2026/07/04 by Trond Arne Undheim
Social Sciences · #Nuclear Issues and Defense #Global Security and Public Health #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
paper · doi:10.1080/00396338.2026.2704351
Nuclear deterrence has always depended on human beings having time to think. Artificial intelligence (AI) is engineering that time out of the system. As AI is integrated into nuclear command, control and communications, it compresses the deliberation windows on which Cold War stability rested, creating ‘escalation opacity’: a condition in which adversaries can no longer verify whether one another’s algorithmic recommendations might escalate, regardless of intentions. Given the Cold War near-miss record and cross-domain evidence from financial, energy and military systems, stability in the algorithmic era requires a shift from mutual vulnerability to mutual intelligibility by way of governance mechanisms targeting the 2025–35 modernisation window, before the architecture of deliberation is permanently redesigned.