Years of escalating global tensions, marked by ongoing conflicts like the war in Ukraine and India and Pakistan’s clash along the border in May of 2025, have raised the alarm about ‘nuclear threats.’ But how should decisionmakers and citizens distinguish serious nuclear threats that demand countervailing action, from nuclear threats that are mere noise aiming to manipulate nuclear anxiety without a serious threat? In turbulent times, the less precise our nuclear discourse, the more fear nuclear manipulators can elicit.

Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program, the Nautilus Institute, and the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network are publishing four major papers over the coming weeks that address the questions and the challenge of decoding and assessing nuclear manipulations.

Join George Perkovich, Japan Chair for a World Without Nuclear Weapons and senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at Carnegie, in conversation with Jon Finer, former deputy U.S. national security advisor, to discuss the first in the series of papers, “How to Assess Nuclear Threats in the 21st Century.”