This is why Americans who say they’re ok with tolerating China because ‘hey, they’ve been peacefully and not started any forever wars’ annoy me. You can say that because China probably won’t touch the US. But Beijing is definitely involved in quite a few wars right now

The China-Global South Project@chinagsproject.bsky.social · 12h ago

China’s defense industry is becoming harder to separate from the wars in the Horn of Africa as Chinese-made weapons from drones and artillery to armored vehicles, are increasingly visible across the battlefields of Sudan and Ethiopia. chinaglobalsouth.com/2026/10/06/c...

Wargaming is such a strange experience - emotionally engaging, fun and sort of terrifying all at the same time. Earlier this week, I introduced a tactical game to a group of scholars working across the humanities. Very rewarding work!

I see that Silo Season 3 couldn't help but have itself a little nuclear sublime ... tsk tsk!

Had not seen this 1985 CIA analysis of China's "tactical" nukes. Claims that Chinese military thinkers "argue that China's nuclear forces do not deter tactical nuclear war because they cannot be used effectively for retaliatory strikes in kind for Soviet use" www.cia.gov/readingroom/...

Over the years working on the Ritual Deterrence project I have often been asked "What is ritual deterrence?" Northrop have now given me a nice 30 second illustrative example: www.youtube.com/watch?app=de...

Stealth Meets Spotlight: B‑21 Blows Out 250 Candles to Celebrate America's Birthday

YouTube video by Northrop Grumman

youtube.com

tremble at the power of the NAND gate! see how it replicates human thought! are we not but grass and goats?

glad to see my 2-year-old paper is finally assigned an issue number, and what a great issue to be in (including @shadimokhtari.bsky.social's brilliant reverse SVS paper) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Cambridge University Press Political Science & IR@cambup-polsci.cambridge.org · 4mo ago

NEW ISSUE from @risjnl.bsky.social - Review of International Studies - Volume 52 - Issue 3 - https://cup.org/4uZXImO cc @mybisa.bsky.social

The first thing that strikes me about the Anthropic essay is that its description of research doesn't really sound like research as I think of it. It sounds like a set of quite narrowly defined problems compared with the originality required for genuine insight. www.anthropic.com/institute/re...

Trump administration continues to suggest speed-running the alternative timeline from Fallout

Luke LeBrun@lukelebrun.ca · 4mo ago

US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra retweets call to annex Canada

🚨🚨 Italo Brandimarte and I have a new article out in International Political Sociology! It is part of the IPS@20 Anniversary Special Issue and is open access at: academic.oup.com/ips/article/.... We call for de-centering the human in temporal world political analysis via 'Deep Global Futures'. ⬇️⬇️

I just discovered that my book is available on Kindle and Google Play at a relatively reasonable price (yep no one told me that and I had to find out myself) there's also free sample to read, in case it could be useful play.google.com/store/books/... www.amazon.co.uk/Easting-West...

Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️@chenchenzhang.net · 5mo ago

Just published! My book, Easting the West: Theorizing the Postliberal Conjuncture from China, is now available online for institutional users with subscription to Oxford Scholarship Online! academic.oup.com/book/62722 The print version will come out next month.

Wrote a thing on why buying into the “generative AI is inevitable so we need to stuff it into all crevices of higher ed” narrative is not only bad pedagogy, but bad Political Science. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Generative AI in the Political Science Classroom: Bringing Politics Back In

Large language models (LLMs) have disrupted higher education, prompting a wave of scholarship on generative AI in the Political Science classroom. This emerging literature largely converges in argu...

tandfonline.com

Check out the amazing and wide ranging free webinars on #wargaming and game design by the Georgetown University Wargaming Society. RT and share to support our ongoing work. Also let us know below which webinars have been your favorite so far! 😁 🎲 🔗 youtube.com/@georgetownu...

open.substack.com/pub/horsdoeu...

Siloed Silos and Analytical Failures

Pictured: the most devious counter-intelligence tool ever devised.

open.substack.com

Wonderful work here by @wellerstein.bsky.social and Peter Kuran. I have also used POWER OF DECISION to try and help students gain a more tangible sense that leaders really were/are prepared to use nuclear weapons. Thank you to both Wellerstein and Kuran for clarifying the film's content.

Alex Wellerstein@wellerstein.bsky.social · 6mo ago

For DOOMSDAY MACHINES this week, a post that has in some sense been in the making for something like a decade. It is a very close look at the "war plan," QUICK STRIKE, featured in the formerly classified 1958 film "The Power of Decision," produced for the USAF. doomsdaymachines.net/p/a-long-loo...

WHIGS IN SPACE! Or why democratisation, commercialisation, and militarisation rhetoric about space is wrong. Very happy to see my new research article published with @ejisbisa.bsky.social! The Perils of periodising astropolitics: space security and the system builders @sgiadurham.bsky.social 🧵👇

Don't forget to register for our next talk! Thursday 26th March, 'Empire of the stars—not yet? China as a ‘partial’ great power in space' with Dimitrios Stroikos at 14:00hrs on Zoom. www.bisa.ac.uk/members/work...

Empire of the stars—not yet? China as a ‘partial’ great power in space- Astropolitics | BISA

- Astropolitics Working Group

bisa.ac.uk

LeoLabs says they see hundreds of debris objects from the Starlink failure event

Some deep irony to China questioning Japan’s sovereignty over Okinawa over Japan’s support for Taiwan. As for me, I ask, why not self-determination for Okinawans? And also Taiwanese, Tibetans, and Uyghurs, and whoever? None of us are free until we all are, lol

New Bloom@newbloommag.net · 10mo ago

"China Raises Okinawan Self-Determination to Challenge Japan, But Why Not Self-Determination for All?" by @brianhioe.bsky.social

So, hey, my new book on Truman and the Bomb comes out NEXT WEEK! In this post on Doomsday Machines, I give a rundown of WHAT IT IS ABOUT, and other useful information, including the talk I am giving about it on December 16. doomsdaymachines.net/p/the-most-a...

"The Most Awful Responsibility"

My new book on Truman and the bomb will be released next week

doomsdaymachines.net

A tiny crack in a spacecraft window triggered China’s first-ever emergency launch to Tiangong space station. A CCTV article reveals what happened over 20 intense days, and why a piece of space debris smaller than 1 mm forced the emergency response.

SpaceNews @spacenewsinc.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Shenzhou-22 docks at Tiangong space station, resolving human spaceflight emergency China’s uncrewed Shenzhou-22 spacecraft has arrived at the Tiangong space station, reestablishing a lifeboat for the crew and ending the orbital outpost’s first operational emergency.

"This study identifies two variations of guanxi work processes. [...] The first pattern features a style of guanxi work that stresses the declaration of pseudo-kin or friendship, ritualistic toasting and drinking, and top-down driven emotion work."

Journal of Current Chinese Affairs@jcca-gigahamburg.bsky.social · 11mo ago

🔔 New #OpenAccess Research Article in #JCCA Journal of Current Chinese Affairs @giga-hamburg.de @sagepub.com Zhang and Chew analyse “ #guanxi work processes” in Chinese banquets. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Wait did Bigelow make a nuke movie with a North Korean ICBM launch that's somehow less realistic than my 2018 short story? www.vice.com/en/article/a... (tl;dr: Kim Jong-un tests a single ICBM, US fires several interceptors, Russian radar misses DPRK missile but seems many US missiles, nuclear war)

Airplane Mode

In a world perpetually on the brink of nuclear destruction, there can only be so many false alarms—right?

vice.com

Gerry Doyle@mgerrydoyle.bsky.social · 12mo ago

-north korea is not going to launch a single icbm at the u.s.; why would they? -the u.s. would not fire just a single interceptor at it to stop it -if it got through somehow there would not be any reason whatsoever to decide *before it hit* how the u.s. should respond

Theodor Adorno liked wombats, and so should you

🇵🇸Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer🖖🏳️‍🌈@nuclearanthro.bsky.social · 12mo ago

😻😻😻CLEANSING THERMONUCLEAR FIRE IS CANCELED FOR THE EARLY MORNING! HOORAY WOMBATS ADORABLY CUBE POOPING MARSUPIALS!😻😻😻

I was going to write something more general about Curtis LeMay, but I fell into the rabbit hole that is his bizarre memoir, “Mission with LeMay,” and felt that this was more than enough for one DOOMSDAY MACHINES post… doomsdaymachines.net/p/i-have-sou...

"I have sought to slaughter as few civilians as possible."

The rabid, apocalyptic Beat poetry that is "Mission with LeMay"

doomsdaymachines.net

Thinking of doing a space policy/security PhD where I and my Durham colleagues could supervise but need funding? Have a look at the NINE DTP funding programme, now open. You need approval from host department first - internal deadline 9th January. www.ninedtp.ac.uk

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Just spectacular how little the US debate on China's space tech has moved on since 1958. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Forgotten First Iteration of the ‘Chinese Space Threat’ to US National Security

Existing analyses of US-China relations in matters of space policy have overwhelmingly focused on the contemporary relationship, with a tendency to re…

sciencedirect.com

Bleddyn Bowen@bleddb.bsky.social · last yr.

There's a lot to talk about China's potential in shaping the future of lunar science and its governance - but the importance about 'being first' is just utter lunacy/lobbying. China can't be the first to land astronauts on the Moon!

My colleagues and I here at the FAS Nuclear Information Project have posted this analysis of the nukes at the Chinese victory day parade. If you have corrections/suggestions, please let us know. fas.org/publication/...

Nuclear Weapons At China's 2025 Victory Day Parade - Federation of American Scientists

This buildup appears to contradict China's obligations under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and could well stimulate nuclear buildups in the United States and India.

fas.org