The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies presents:

The 16th Annual Kenneth N. Waltz Lecture in International Relations:

“Are Nuclear Weapons a Good Bet?” with Janice Stein, University of Toronto 

Event Details: 

Thursday, November 13, 2025

4:00pm-6:00pm

1512 International Affairs Building

Registration for this event is no longer available. 

Description: 

The lecture will reprise Waltzian logic with new evidence to explore what precisely nuclear weapons deter. Stein will argue that nuclear weapons do not prevent limited attacks against homeland territory below the threshold of invasion. Drawing on material, normative and psychological explanations, Stein will argue that we need much more refined and contextualized theories of nuclear deterrence, and if her argument is broadly correct, then seeking to become a nuclear power may well be a poor bet.

Program:

Welcome
Elizabeth N. Saunders
Director, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies; Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Columbia University

Opening Remarks
Keren Yarhi-Milo
Dean, School of International and Public Affairs; Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations, Columbia University

Lecture
“Are Nuclear Weapons a Good Bet?”

Janice Stein
Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation; Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

Discussion and Q&A
Janice Stein & Jack Snyder, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations, Columbia University

Farewell
Elizabeth N. Saunders

About the lecture: 
The Annual Kenneth N. Waltz Lecture in International Relations was established by the Institute in September, 2008, in celebration of Waltz’s many outstanding contributions to the field of international relations. Waltz was forever grateful to the Institute for giving him office space and collegial support while he completed his first book, Man, the State, and War. Read about the lecture here.

Biographies: 

Kenneth N. Waltz

Before completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954, Waltz served in the United States Army during the Second World War and the Korean conflict.  He was a member of the Columbia University faculty (1953-1957), and he subsequently taught at Swarthmore College, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Berkeley (1971-1994), before returning to Columbia and the Institute in 1997. Waltz was a research associate with the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University on several occasions, and with the Department of War Studies, Kings College, University of London.  He taught at the London School of Economics, the Australian National University, Peking University, Fudan University, the United States Air Force Academy, and the University of Bologna.

Waltz was President of the American Political Science Association (1987-1988). He has received honorary doctorates from Copenhagen University,  Oberlin College, Nankai University, Aberystwyth University, and most recently  from the University of Macedonia in Saloniki, Greece, which he accepted in person in the spring of 2011. Waltz was also the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters. His most recent articles included: “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” in Foreign Affairs (July/Aug 2012); “The Great Debate,” an exchange with Scott Sagan on nuclear weapons in The National Interest (Sep-Oct 2010); and with then-Columbia University Ph.D. candidate Mira Rapp-Hooper (now at CNAS), “What Kim Jong-Il Learned from Qaddafi’s Fall: Never Disarm,” The Atlantic (online, October 24, 2011). Waltz remained active in the life of the Institute as a Senior Research Scholar until his death on May 13, 2013 at the age of 88.

Waltz’s books include Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (Columbia University Press, 1954, 1959, 2001), Theory of International Politics (Addison-Wesley, 1979), and Realism and International Politics (Routledge, 2008). The third, updated edition of The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (W.W. Norton, 1995, 2003), which he wrote with Scott Sagan, was published in 2012. At the time of his death he was still advising students, doing research on nuclear deterrence, and revisiting canonical works of international relations theory. In his later years, Waltz divided his time between homes on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Harborside, Maine.

Janice Gross Stein

Janice Gross Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and the founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario. She is an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the Massey Lecturer in 2001 and an inaugural Trudeau Fellow. She was awarded the Molson Prize by the Canada Council for an outstanding contribution by a social scientist to public debate. She has been awarded Honorary Doctorate of Laws by five universities around the world. In 1996, Stein became a University Professor, the highest honour the university accords its faculty. Her research sits at the intersection of cognitive science, psychology, and international politics as she focuses on decision making and strategy. The author of eight books and more than a hundred articles, her most recent work is on the management of escalation and the psychological, institutional, and political factors that explain surprise. Her latest research focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and technology.

Elizabeth N. Saunders

Elizabeth N. Saunders is Director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.  Her research and teaching interests focus on the domestic politics of international security and U.S. foreign policy, including the presidency and foreign policy, and the politics of war. Prior to joining Columbia, she was a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her most recent book, The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace, was published by Princeton University Press in 2024 and won the 2025 Best Book Award from ISA’s Foreign Policy Analysis section. Her first book, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions, was published in 2011 by Cornell University Press and won the 2012 Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award from APSA’s International History and Politics section. She has previously been a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; a postdoctoral fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University; a Brookings Institution Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies; and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She holds an A.B. in physics and astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard College; an M.Phil. in international relations from the University of Cambridge; and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

Keren Yarhi-Milo

Keren Yarhi-Milo is Dean of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations. She is a renowned scholar and leading authority on international security, foreign policy decision-making, and political psychology, and author of two award-winning books: Who Fights for Reputation: The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), winner of both the American Political Science Association’s Foreign Policy Section Book Award and the International Studies Association’s Best Foreign Policy Book Award; and Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2014), winner of the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award in International Security Studies. She recently co-edited Inside the Situation Room: The Theory and Practice of Crisis Decision Making (Oxford University Press, 2025) with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has published extensively in leading academic journals as well as in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Yarhi-Milo serves as editor of the Princeton Studies in International History and Politics book series. In 2023, she cofounded the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University with Secretary Clinton as a hub for interdisciplinary engagement on global challenges. Yarhi-Milo earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jack Snyder

Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science, a member of Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and is currently the Acting Director of the Harriman Institute. His books include Human Rights for Pragmatists: Social Power in Modern Times (Princeton University Press, 2022); Human Rights Futures (co-edited with Stephen Hopgood and Leslie Vinjamuri, Cambridge University Press, 2017); Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance (co-editor with Alexander Cooley; Cambridge University Press, 2015); Power and Progress: International Politics in Transition (Routledge, 2012); Religion and International Relations Theory (Columbia, 2011); Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (MIT Press, 2005), co-authored with Edward D. Mansfield; From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (Norton 2000); Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Cornell, 1991); and Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention, co-editor with Barbara Walter (Columbia, 1999). His articles on such topics as democratization and war, imperial overstretch, war crimes tribunals versus amnesties as strategies for preventing atrocities, and international relations theory after September 11 have appeared in The American Political Science Review, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Organization, International Security, and World Politics. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Snyder holds a B.A. from Harvard University, a Certificate from Columbia’s Russian Institute, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

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