Professor Lisa Koch from Claremont McKenna College will speak at the MIT Security Studies Program's Wednesday Seminar.

When leaders issue nuclear threats, how are those threats perceived? A nuclear threat should lack credibility because carrying out the threat could trigger massive retaliation of some kind. Nonetheless, nuclear threats are not simply dismissed as non-credible. Instead, nuclear threats appear to inspire fear. In this seminar, Professor Koch will present her research on how US decision-makers perceive and respond to 21st-century nuclear threats.