Ulrich Kühn is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the head of the arms control and emerging technologies program at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg. Previously, he was a senior research associate at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (VCDNP)/James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow with Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. He holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in political sciences from Hamburg University, an MA in Peace Research and Security Policy from Hamburg University, and a Magister Artium in medieval and newer history as well as German literature from the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms University Bonn. His current research focuses on NATO-Russian relations, transatlantic security, nuclear and conventional deterrence and arms control, and the proceedings of the OSCE.
Kühn worked for the German Federal Foreign Office and was awarded United Nations Fellow on Disarmament in 2011. He is the founder and a permanent member of the trilateral Deep Cuts Commission and an alumnus of the ZEIT Foundation Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius.
His articles and commentary have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Washington Quarterly, and War on the Rocks.
Great power competition between the United States and both Russia and China, the return of war and nuclear threats to Europe, and the emergence of new technologies have created a turning point in Germany. In Berlin, policymakers are discussing potential adaptations to Germany's nuclear policies.
Germans are debating nuclear deterrence—again.
A comprehensive look at Germany’s nuclear weapons policies in the twenty-first century.
The concept of strategic stability has come under immense pressure in recent years. Nuclear multipolarity, novel technologies, an exacerbating crisis in arms control, and a growing acceptance of “softer” norms are all taking a toll.
The resulting framework may look very different from arms control of the past. But it would be better than a future in which proliferation proceeds in the absence of any shared guardrails for handling the most dangerous weapons in the world.
Some of these technologies have the potential to significantly undermine international peace and security, particularly if pursued and deployed uncritically.
For this roundtable, we invited four scholars, practitioners, and abolition advocates to further articulate what a research agenda on nuclear injustice should look like.
Europe’s biggest security crisis of recent decades has brought back fear of nuclear use, nuclear war, and arms racing.
New types of missiles, an adversarial NATO-Russia relationship, and the ever-present threat of inadvertent escalation make it necessary to start thinking anew how verifiable arms control with Russia may look like in the future.
The global nuclear order—built on policies of nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, and disarmament—is unjust. Russia’s war against Ukraine proves that the distribution of the costs and benefits of nuclear deterrence is particularly discriminatory.
