Todd S. Sechser is the Pamela Feinour Edmonds and Franklin S. Edmonds Jr. Discovery Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia; Professor of Public Policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy; and a Senior Fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs.
Dr. Sechser’s research interests include coercive diplomacy, emerging technologies, nuclear security, and political violence. He is coauthor of the book Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and his research has appeared in academic journals such as International Organization, the American Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Non-Proliferation Review. His writing on policy issues has been published in media outlets such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and the Christian Science Monitor, and he regularly consults for several government and military agencies. He is also the director of the Program on Strategic Stability Evaluation, a multi-university working group studying the effects of new technologies on international military stability.
Dr. Sechser was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a John M. Olin National Security Fellow at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, where he wrote an award-winning doctoral dissertation. Before entering academia, Dr. Sechser worked as a nuclear policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Nuclear weapons may be useful for deterrence, but can they also coerce? Our theories reach opposite conclusions: we say no; Kroenig says yes. Both sides marshal evidence to support their arguments. So who is right? Our goal in this post is to evaluate Kroenig’s empirical results and respond to his critique of our article.
Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann argue that possessing nuclear weapons confers few benefits for coercive diplomacy.