My research asks a question that sits at the center of the nuclear age: when a rival state moves toward the bomb, what determines whether a great power responds with diplomacy, with war, or with nothing at all? States confronting proliferation command an arsenal of instruments — diplomacy, sanctions, covert action, the threat and the use of force — yet history shows their choices are far more constrained, and far less predictable, than existing theories of deterrence and coercion allow. My dissertation develops an original account of this choice, tested against four of the defining proliferation crises of the post-Cold War order: Iraq, Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

This project belongs to a broader effort to rethink how power, time, and constraint govern the politics of the nuclear era. Related work asks how nuclear-armed democracies sustain trust and interdependence across generations, how personalist and authoritarian regimes reason about risk when the stakes are existential, and whether the instruments of coercion can ever be redirected toward genuine cooperation rather than mere containment. Taken together, this research is an attempt to understand one of the enduring dilemmas of international politics: how order is kept, or lost, in the shadow of the bomb.