The following policy memo was written and posted by the Stanley Foundation.

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How might a nuclear crisis play out in today’s media environment? What dynamics in this information ecosystem—with social media increasing the velocity and reach of information, disrupting journalistic models, creating potent vectors for disinformation, and changing how political leaders interact with constituencies—might challenge decision making during crises between nuclear-armed states?

This memo discusses facets of the modern information ecosystem and how they might affect decision making involving the use of nuclear weapons, based on insights from a multidisciplinary roundtable. The memo concludes with more questions than answers. Because the impact of social media on international crisis stability is recent, there are few cases from which to draw conclusions. But because the catastrophic impact of a nuclear exchange is so great, there is a need to further investigate the mechanisms by which the current information ecosystem could influence decisions about the use of these weapons. To that end, the memo poses a series of questions to inspire future research to better understand new—or newly important—dynamics in the information ecosystem and international security environment.