III. Conclusion: The Danger of Waiting for a New Cuban Missile Crisis or Chernobyl Moment

III. Conclusion: The Danger of Waiting for a New Cuban Missile Crisis or Chernobyl Moment

Many workshop participants and others consulted on this report recalled recent discussions of contemporary security problems in which experts argued that we need “a new Cuban Missile Crisis” or “a new Chernobyl accident” as a “wake-up call” for public opinion, expert consensus, and international cooperation to coalesce around the serious security problems we face. Past “close calls” to disaster were seen as necessary for the creation of international arms control, nuclear reactor safety, and security collaborations. Some argue that we need a near-disaster in lethal autonomous vehicles, attempted AGI “takeover,” regional nuclear proliferation, or bioterrorism to make change possible.

There are at least four major problems with waiting for a future crisis to motivate new investments in research and teaching on the new security environment. First, close calls are inherently dangerous and the more we learn about Cold War crises and nuclear power accidents, the more we recognize how easily they could have led to disastrous outcomes. We need to learn from past mistakes, of course, but we also need vicarious learning from war games, simulations, and even the mistakes of others. Investing now in work that identifies both potential causes of future crises and ways to mitigate their impacts can help stave off those dangerous close calls. 

Second, unless we have strong intellectual leaders interpreting crises and applying reasonable lessons learned, we are likely to draw the wrong conclusions from those wake-up calls. We would argue that this has happened, for example, after the COVID-19 pandemic that killed, according to the WHO, well over 3 million individuals worldwide, but has not led to consensus about the best ways to avoid such public health disasters in the future. Instead, discussions of the pandemic’s causes and the response tend toward one of two directions: either acrimonious debates about blame and responsibility; or “lowest common denominator” diplomatic solutions that misdiagnose the drivers of the competitive and nationalistic government policies we saw during COVID-19.12 As a result, individual countries and international organizations have done far less than they could to stimulate productive international cooperation to prevent or mitigate the effects of future pandemics. 

Third, unless we have developed better ideas ahead of time about how best to respond to crises when they occur, we will be slow to react and miss windows of opportunity. This is most obviously true for the policy community, but it applies to the research community as well. This paper is an effort to develop those ideas and provide a useful but flexible blueprint for the future of the security studies field.

Fourth, this “waiting for a crisis” view reflects a lingering fatalism. We want to underscore the gravity of the multiple security crises we are already experiencing and the urgency of the need to act now. Scholars must invest more of their time and energy to meet this moment. Universities and foundations must do the same through timely and strategic investments of their resources. Together we can create a more secure future than the one we are tumbling toward today.