Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research interests include nuclear strategy, escalation, missiles and missile defense, space security, and U.S. alliances. He is the author of The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon (Polity, 2025), Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals: Avoiding Spirals and Mitigating Risks (Carnegie, 2023), and Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea (Hurst/Oxford, 2020). Panda is co-editor of New Approaches to Verifying and Monitoring North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal (Carnegie, 2021).

Panda has consulted for the United Nations in New York and Geneva, and his analysis has been sought by U.S. Strategic Command, Space Command, and Indo-Pacific Command. Panda is among the most highly cited experts worldwide on North Korean nuclear capabilities. He has testified on matters related to South Korea and Japan before the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Panda has also testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. Before joining Carnegie, Panda was an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and a journalist covering international security. Panda is a frequent expert commentator in print and broadcast media around the world on nuclear policy and defense matters. He is editor-at-large at the Diplomat, where he hosts the Asia Geopolitics podcast, and a contributing editor at War on the Rocks, where he hosts Thinking the Unthinkable With Ankit Panda, a podcast on nuclear matters.

Where do you see the most exciting research or debates happening in your field today?

There are several, but I’ve been most enmeshed in two of late. The first concerns the future of U.S. nuclear strategy and force posture — specifically, whether the United States should expand its nuclear arsenal beyond the levels maintained over the past decade. Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has largely operated in an environment of relatively low nuclear risk. That perception is shifting. Many analysts now see a more dangerous landscape: a rapidly expanding Chinese arsenal, a Russia waging conventional war in Europe under the nuclear shadow, an established nuclear North Korea, and a fast-evolving technological context. In some ways, this is the latest iteration of a familiar question that has animated U.S. nuclear strategy since the Cold War: how much is enough to ensure credible deterrence? The issue remains unsettled.........

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