Lisa Koch, Ph.D.
lkoch@cmc.edu
Associate Professor
Claremont McKenna College
About Me:
Lisa Langdon Koch is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, specializing in international relations. In 2023, she received the Glenn R. Huntoon Award for Superior Teaching. Koch is the author of Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs (Oxford University Press 2023), which won the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award. She has published numerous articles on topics like nuclear proliferation and foreign policy. Koch is a 2021 Stanton Foundation Nuclear Security Grant Program winner. Her research has also been funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. She is a 2000 Harry S. Truman Scholar.
Research Interests
Nuclear Weapons
Foreign Policy
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Few military regimes have seriously pursued a nuclear weapons capability, and only Pakistan has succeeded. I argue that military regimes governing nonnuclear weapons states are likely to prefer to invest in conventional rather than nuclear forces, even in the presence of external security threats. I identify two domestic sources of nuclear proliferation behavior in military regimes: the resource distribution preferences of the military organization and the need to manage the domestic conflicts that threaten the regime’s political survival. I test this theory using case evidence from Egypt, Brazil, and Pakistan. This study suggests that while external conditions are certainly important, domestic factors also have a significant impact on state security behavior.
How do Americans’ core beliefs about punishment, and their intuitions about which actors deserve blame, shape attitudes toward the use of force against a hostile state? I apply insights from recent work in social psychology to investigate the causal mechanisms linking punitive beliefs to support for a nuclear strike. In a large-N study, I find that the strength and ethical logic underlying beliefs about punishment affect attitudes regarding the use of nuclear weapons, and who to blame for the crisis, which mediates the causal pathway. Those who ground their support for severe punishment not in the logic of moral justice, but in societal benefit, are more likely to hold foreign citizens socially responsible for their state's actions.
Do international nonproliferation institutions affect the decisions states make about their nuclear weapons programs? Most studies of nuclear reversal analyze outcomes, rather than decisions. However, states do not uniformly pursue nuclear weaponization but proceed along different paths lined by decisions affecting state resources, research and development, and materials and production. These decisions, which may delay or undermine a program, are critically important to understanding nuclear proliferation processes and outcomes. Using a new data set of non-termination nuclear reversal decisions across three key aspects of program development, I capture more of the process of nuclear reversal. I investigate whether two major nonproliferation institutions, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), influence state decisions about whether to continue investing in ongoing programs. I argue that NSG members have strengthened cooperation across three distinct policy eras and find that the NGS's market controls have generated material constraints that raise the likelihood that states will make nuclear reversal decisions. I do not find evidence that the NPT contributes to reversal decisions within the context of ongoing programs. These findings have implications for the impact of international institutions on state behavior and for counterproliferation policy effectiveness.
Co-authored with Matthew Wells. How robust is the “nuclear taboo”—the belief that it is wrong to use nuclear weapons—and can it be strengthened? In a series of experimental surveys, we investigate two mechanisms theorized to support the nuclear nonuse norm. First, we examine the moral foundation of the norm by testing whether respondents who receive descriptions of the aftermath of a nuclear blast will be less supportive of nuclear weapons use. Second, we assess the mechanism of self-interest by raising a sense of nuclear risk, and test whether varying the likelihood of nuclear retaliation affects support for a strike. We find that vivid information about the consequences of a nuclear strike, either in moral or self-interested terms, reduces support for nuclear use. These findings indicate that each of the two mechanisms may support the nuclear nonuse tradition, but that the strength of eachmechanism is affected by exposure to vivid information.
Do trade barriers help slow the spread of nuclear weapons? Supply-side controls on proliferation equipment and material are often dismissed as ineffective because nuclear weapons–seeking states can develop methods to circumvent the controls. However, these global export controls have important secondary effects. By creating barriers to trade, export controls force states to develop costly and inefficient methods that interfere with progress toward nuclear weapons development. Using case evidence beginning with the advent of the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s export control regime in 1974, I argue that the resulting delay and frustration can change leaders’ strategic calculations regarding the value of their nuclear weapons programs. These findings demonstrate that proliferation controls do slow the spread of nuclear weapons, both by delaying existing programs, and by decreasing the likelihood that leaders will make decisions to continue with, or even start, nuclear weapons programs.
Books Written:
Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accelerate or reverse progress toward nuclear weapons define each state's course. Whether or not a state ultimately acquires nuclear weapons depends to a large extent on those nuclear decisions. This book offers a novel theory of nuclear decision-making that identifies two mechanisms that shape leaders' understandings of the costs and benefits of their nuclear pursuits. The internal mechanism is the intervention of domestic experts in key scientific and military organizations. If the conditions are right, those experts may be able to influence a leader's nuclear decision-making. The external mechanism emerges from the structure and politics of the international system. Nuclear Decisions: Changing the Course of Nuclear Weapons Programs identifies three different proliferation eras, in which changes to international political and structural conditions have constrained or freed states pursuing nuclear weapons development. Scholars and practitioners alike will gain new insights from the fascinating case studies of nine states across the three eras. Through this global approach to studying nuclear proliferation, this book pushes back against the conventional wisdom that determined states pursue a straight path to the bomb. Instead, nuclear decisions define a state's nuclear pursuits.
Other:
Blog post with Matthew S. Wells In the months after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, word began to spread that the residents of those cities had suffered unique horrors. Fearing that public outrage would make nuclear weapons unusable in the future, government officials who supported their development—like General Leslie Groves—worked hard to downplay their singularly devastating effects. That November, Groves even insisted to a Senate committee that radiation exposure was a pleasant way to die. In surveying a representative sample of Americans, when we provided real-life information about the suffering and damage that nuclear and conventional strikes would cause, Americans were significantly less likely to support the use of nuclear weapons. Our study indicates that Groves was right to worry about how much Americans knew. People’s beliefs about the damage wrought by nuclear weapons matter. If we are to prevent the use of nuclear weapons, it is vital to teach people about the terrible harm they cause. Americans will oppose inflicting horrific suffering on others, even in war—but too few may know that nuclear weapons will cause such harm.