The goal of this project has been to explore the concept of behavioural insights as applied to nuclear decision-making, and to point out areas in which behavioural insights could improve the process by which nuclear decisions are made. The areas covered in this paper do not aim to be exhaustive; other areas that seemed promising for behavioural interventions were initially identified, but ultimately fell outside the scope of this paper.
Behavioural insights can help to improve the efficiency of states’ security infrastructure and diplomatic processes. As the international security environment continues to deteriorate, it will likely take some time for such improvements to be made and take effect. Over both the medium and long term, however, behavioural insights could play an increasingly significant role in formulating policy recommendations for nuclear policy.
In particular, former officials consulted as part of the project mentioned the difficulties in changing institutional culture, which is an important part of ensuring that practices can be updated and improvements stick. Examining institutional and strategic culture in greater depth and identifying best practice for having a positive culture of lifelong learning and development are areas where behavioural insights could help facilitate lasting change. The importance of developing specific training for leaders to give them a better understanding of how they might react in a crisis is another important lesson. Making good decisions under stressful conditions is difficult. Giving leaders the space to develop crisis decision-making practice that allows them to strengthen their resilience and calibrate overconfidence where necessary would greatly increase government resilience overall.
A significant nuclear policy challenge is expected to arise in the next decade regarding how to negotiate new arms control agreements after many treaties have expired or have been suspended. Behavioural insights can play a significant role in the process of defining how to structure the negotiations for new types of arms control – including ‘behavioural’ arms control, which aims to encourage restraint and predictability among states. Behavioural insights can also help develop incentive structures for compliance. While it might be easier to incorporate best practice in newly negotiated treaties, there might also be a role for behavioural insights in reviewing and updating existing diplomatic processes to enable relationship-building between states and improve the negotiation experience. A working group of States Parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) convened to discuss the question of NPT reform ahead of the 2022 Preparatory Committee meeting. This is one example where behavioural insights could help with the analysis and recommendation of how to improve all states parties’ negotiation experience. States’ discussions highlighted the potential for negotiation processes to be updated to enable better interaction between States Parties and allow progress on agreed actions to be tracked and carried forward more easily. Easing some of these sources of tension within the NPT would help strengthen the treaty and thereby also strengthen non-proliferation as a norm.
Finally, behavioural insights could help to develop comprehensive models of ally and competitor behaviour, as well as ensuring these models are fed into all aspects of policy testing. As discussed in earlier sections of this paper, examples of good practice already exist in some governments and for certain policy areas – particularly with regard to red-teaming or emulation. However, experts consulted for this project noted the risks of poor-quality red-teaming. Caricatures of a potential adversary are easy to conjure and difficult to dispel, as they reinforce inaccurate narratives already present in public discourse. It is therefore important for red teams to contain regional, cultural and linguistic experts to provide useful insights into an adversary’s domestic environment and strategic culture.
Behavioural insights have the potential to help the nuclear policy field to update processes and practices and innovate thinking for the challenges ahead. Heightened international tensions, nuclear modernization processes and interlocking domestic and international crises make this a difficult time to reduce nuclear risks. However, given the potentially catastrophic impact of nuclear weapons, the work of improving decision-making remains crucial.
