Consistent with priorities articulated in the recent National Security Strategy of the United States and the National Defense Authorization Act, a central mission of the Center for Strategic Deterrence and Weapons of Mass Destruction Studies (CSWMDS) is advancing analyses, scholarship, policy support, and professional military education focal to deterrence and countering weapons of mass destruction (CWMD) in an era defined by intensifying strategic competition. Peer competitors, adversarial states, their proxies, and non-state actors are increasingly investing in convergent technological approaches that leverage a broad spectrum of chemical, biological, and nuclear sciences, often integrated with advances in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, advanced materials, and precision delivery systems. These developments blur traditional categorical boundaries between WMD domains and create new pathways by which mass-effect capabilities can be developed, concealed, and operationalized.
In this context, the CSDWMDS serves as a collaborative nexus for understanding how such convergent technological trajectories alter the threat landscape and challenge existing deterrence, arms-control, and nonproliferation frameworks. Through interdisciplinary research, strategic foresight analysis, and engagement with defense, interagency, industrial and allied stakeholders, the CSDWMDS examines how adversaries could employ hybrid chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) capabilities for coercion, disruption, or escalation in ways that complicate attribution, response thresholds, and international governance and response.
With support from INSS Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs, and Programs in Homeland Defense, and Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare, the CSDWMD engages national efforts to strengthen deterrence and CWMD strategies, enhance preparedness across the joint force, and inform whole-of-nation approaches to preventing the development, proliferation, and use of WMDs on the current and near future global stage.
Read our publications about WMD threats.