Welcome! I am a 2025-2026 Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at RAND in Washington, D.C. I am also a Faculty Associate for Research at the Institute for Regional and International Security (IRIS) at the Naval Postgraduate School. I received my PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 2025.

For over a decade, I have worked at the intersection of research and policy on South Asian security, U.S.-India relations, and nuclear strategy. Since 2012, I have designed and led over 20 Track 1.5 strategic dialogues, war games, and tabletop exercises for U.S. government sponsors, including nine U.S.-India bilateral events. My co-edited volume, The Challenges of Nuclear Security: U.S. and Indian Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), grew out of this sustained bilateral engagement. I regularly brief findings and policy recommendations to senior U.S. national security officials. 

These engagements directly inform my broader research agenda: how do stronger states use threats and inducements to influence their partners’ behavior, and what do those partners do about it? I am particularly interested in how partner states balance the risks associated with dependence with the rewards of close alignment. In my dissertation, I use conventional arms curtailment to investigate these issues and develop a theory of client response strategies. I assess my theory with case studies of Soviet-Iraqi and U.S.-Pakistani relations during the Cold War, drawing on multilingual archival research from six countries.

At RAND, I am extending this work to investigate how the denial of conventional weapons affects states’ decisions to pursue nuclear weapons, connecting the study of arms transfers to questions of nuclear proliferation.

My other [published work→Publications] addresses nuclear strategies and postures, deterrence stability, and the conventional arms trade.

I can be reached at diana.wueger@gmail.com. My Google Scholar page can be found here.