Nuclear weapons pose one of the few existential threats to the security of the United States. Reducing the risk posed by nuclear weapons in the international system remains a key priority for the academic, policy, and military communities. However, traditional understandings of nuclear weapons decision-making often ignore Congress, assuming that legislators defer to the president on key geostrategic decisions. Members of Congress have plenty of reasons to involve themselves in American nuclear policy and may be less willing to defer to the president’s geostrategic aims in the current era of increasing polarization, party competition, and divided government. Thus, we ask how do these domestic political factors affect American nuclear nonproliferation efforts abroad? In this project, we address these questions through a multi-method approach that combines an original large-n data collection of congressional involvement in nuclear weapons policymaking and an experiment using functional MRI (fMRI) to examine the psychological and neural underpinnings of elite decision making in the context of nuclear policy under different situational constraints. We conclude with recommendations for policymakers.
Haas et al. (Tue,) studied this question.