The President and the Bomb Project is dedicated to exploring, documenting, and organizing information about the history, policy, and future of the political command and control of nuclear weapons. While the project’s focus will initially be the case of Presidential unilateral control of nuclear weapons in the United States, in its expanded form it has ambitions to discuss the systems of the other nuclear nations as well.
The project is run by Avner Cohen at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey and Alex Wellerstein at the Stevens Institute of Technology. The seed money for this project, and this website, was generously provided by the Ploughshares Fund. The project is administered out of the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
This website, as it develops, will seek to organize information about the project, with the goal of furthering both academic, policy, and popular discourse about the issues involved, and to help clarify some of the tricky political, historical, and technical issues inherent to the subject. To be notified about updates, please feel free to subscribe to our news feed.
As it currently exists, this website is meant to be a demonstration of what a larger website could be capable of, serving as a hub of information about the history and policy of presidential unilateral nuclear use. As it exists now, it is very much incomplete, but the infrastructure is evident for its possible expansion.