Bryan Early, a UAlbany political scientist and global arms control expert, explains how smart policy can empower banks to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — and how emerging technologies like AI pose new challenges for those dedicated to keeping the world's most dangerous weapons from spreading.
The title of Bryan Early and Togzhan Kassenova’s forthcoming book on the financing and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is evocative: Banks and The Bomb.
The bomb. As in, the atomic bomb.
But wait… Is that something we’re still worried about? Is the spread of nuclear weapons still the biggest threat to global peace and security in 2026? Certainly, it’s been in the news a lot following the June 2025 U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and, more recently, the lapse of a major arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia that, among other things, capped the number of nuclear warheads in circulation.
The answer is complicated, and Bryan did a great job explaining why in a part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit.
We also asked him if the rise of cryptocurrencies is interfering with the ability of governments and banks to use the financial system to police illicit weapons transactions.
Here’s what he had to say.
Without being alarmist, what concerns you most about the technology that's trying to get out and that people are trying to jailbreak these days?
BE: I would say nuclear weapons are the technology we're most concerned about because they have the greatest potential destructive impact. Chemical weapons have kind of the lowest threshold for use because there are a lot of dual-use chemicals. I don't know if you've watched Breaking Bad, but he makes phosgene [a poison gas] through his meth-making process. He also — well, I don't want to give away the plot — but he also develops a biological weapon and uses it at the end of the series through his knowledge of chemistry. You can use chemistry to build weapons, but developing sophisticated, dedicated chemical weapons is much harder to do. What I would say I'm more worried about right now from a proliferation perspective are some of these unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned underwater vehicles.
There are a lot of ways that unmanned systems are being weaponized and used in warfare in places like the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, where we've gained a greater appreciation that civilians using off-the-shelf technology can build pretty dangerous conventional weapons. And you can put a chemical weapon on it; if you have a biological agent, you can put that on it. A nuclear warhead's going to take something bigger. But you can get some pretty dangerous off-the-shelf capabilities that aren't really being regulated very well — or really at all for some of the lower-range aerial systems. And so that's one where if a non-state actor wants to use that and wants to acquire these capabilities, the threshold is pretty low. Are they going to be able to carry off a severe attack directly? No. But if you attack a vulnerable piece of infrastructure at the right place or at the right time, you can do a lot of damage.
What happens when transactions move outside the banking system? Does crypto’s existence, and the way it is used, undermine the ability of the financial system to be a watchdog?
BE: Crypto has been an amazing boon for countries subject to economic sanctions, like North Korea, because it has provided them with a way to operate outside of the traditional financial system and to engage in large-scale financial transactions that are by design meant to make it harder for governments to track the parties involved. What's been interesting about North Korea from our case research is that crypto is not only a way to move money, it’s a target of fundraising.
The North Koreans are able to steal and hack crypto wallets or the virtual asset service providers that are facilitating transactions. And so North Korea is able to raise millions, and even billions, of dollars through these thefts. Once they have the money, they use the crypto ecosystem to launder those funds. They could take their funds to mixer sites or decentralized exchanges. The decentralized exchanges turn it from Ethereum into Bitcoin. Once it's changed into Bitcoin, they can then take it to a mixer site that mixes the funds through a bunch of different accounts, and then they're transferred on to other wallets. So they're able to steal funds within this ecosystem, then launder the funds.
There are ways at the other side of the system, when they actually try to cash out, that you can use financial systems that are being regulated, or crypto asset providers that are being regulated similar to financial institutions, to employ due diligence to scrutinize transactions. But this has been one of the real big challenges over the last five- to 10 years — that proliferators are able to use these channels to raise funds and move funds.
Learn more the Project on International Security, Commerce, and Economic Statecraft.
Read about its work across the globe.
Bryan’s previous book, Busted Sanctions: Explaining Why Economic Sanctions Fail, was published in 2015.
Research by Maggie Hartley
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photos by Mario Sotomayor
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
[0:01] Host: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany Podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions, and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:18] Bryan Early: Chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, advanced missile systems. We try to keep the world's deadliest weapons away from the world's most dangerous actors.
[0:27] Host: In the Tom Clancy version of this story, a commando team helicopters into remote enemy territory and — with stealth, daring and brute force — destroys a secret weapons program.
You've probably seen that movie before. It's exciting stuff. And, in the real world, that is sometimes what happens. But ideally it never gets to that point. Ideally, those helicopters stay safely on the ground, those commandos stay in their barracks, and international peace and stability are preserved without a shot being fired or a life lost.
Bryan Early, a professor and political scientist at UAlbany's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, has spent his professional life devoted to that much less cinematic version. In 2012, Early founded the Project on International Security, Commerce and Economic Statecraft, or PISCES. He's an expert on trade controls, economic sanctions, and the other levers that governments can pull to stop — or at least slow down — those with bad intentions from building big weapons that can hurt a lot of people. Things like bio weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons — and the means to use them: drones and missiles.
Much of his work with foreign governments and businesses over the years is not the kind of stuff that he can freely talk about. Lately though, Bryan's research has focused on another pressure point in the global arms control system — money. Or more specifically: the big financial institutions that move money, mostly in U.S. dollars, and make global trade possible.
Early’s forthcoming book written with PISCES colleague Togzhan Kassenova is called Banks and the Bomb. It examines how banks can help stop the spread of nuclear weapons in the same way they've been employed to sniff out terrorists, drug dealers and human traffickers. The banks are a chokepoint, and their reliance on the U.S. dollar gives U.S. policymakers regulatory muscle to press them into service. At the same time, though, daily headlines suggest a wobbling of the political world order that underpinned decades of international arms control.
We spoke to Bryan about the whack-a-mole nature of this non-proliferation work; the challenges and economic trade-offs posed by new technologies like AI that can be used for good or bad; and the behind-the-scenes political and economic statecraft quietly aimed at keeping us safe.
Here's our conversation.
[2:58] Host: Is this what 11-year-old Bryan early thought he'd be doing?
[3:02] Bryan Early: What really got me interested in this topic was I did high school debate and one of the topics was “Resolved: the U.S. government should substantially change its foreign policy towards Russia.” And I developed a case that was the U.S. and Russia should cooperate on ballistic missile defense. Now, a little naive all things considered, but it got me interested in international politics, and it got me interested in these technologies, and so flash forward to when I'm an undergrad, I had an opportunity to take some classes on weapons of mass destruction, and I was in college when 9/11 happened, so I got interested in these issues.
The most formative moment, though, was when I was doing an internship in Washington, D.C., in the U.S. Senate working in the mailroom when we got a letter that I picked up and opened and I got a woooof of very noxious gas that filled up the room. They evacuated the office. Myself and another person from the mailroom got locked into the conference center while Capitol Police came up in full HazMat suits to evaluate the situation. And it ended up being a chemical issue. They were using UV light to kill any anthrax. When the UV light hit that chemical, it created a pocket of gas in the letter that I opened and got the noxious fumes from. That was kind of a core life experience for me. I went back from that experience and I wanted to study these weapons, and it linked to things I'd been interested in since high school. So yes, 11-year-old Bryan probably knew he wanted to maybe be an academic, but I had an interesting pathway to study this really specific topic.
[4:48] Host: What is the nexus with political science? Because I think that all government policy is a function to some degree of politics. Is it that simple? Is it simply that there's a lot of political dimension to what is possible in terms of foreign policy and economic policy, or is it more complicated than that?
[5:06] Bryan Early: There are a lot of technical aspects to what we do that do not have technical solutions, and this is where, as you suggested, you really need a policy intervention from a government to play a role in helping to regulate how certain technologies and certain products are shared internationally to make sure that they end up being used for civilian purposes and not misused to build weapons or used as part of terrorism. There are actors like terrorist organizations that have political motivations, or there are actors like states that want to promote security or become more powerful, that view weapons of mass destruction as a means to that end. And so part of the goal of nonproliferation is for states to convince those states not to want them anymore, to figure out how to either get them to agree to international treaties or get them to find peace in their regions and in their neighborhoods so that they don't need these weapons to provide for their security.
With terrorist organizations, it's more complicated. You really have to try to isolate and degrade their capabilities, and part of being able to do that are tools of economic statecraft as well — so sanctions export controls. One of the issues that I'm working on now is proliferation financing controls. Those are ways that you can isolate terrorist organizations from being able to access these goods and technologies, and those very same policies can be used by governments to do that, and then they can also be used against governments that the international community decides that if they get these capabilities, they pose a danger to either their national security or global security.
[6:50] Host: And so a lot of the work that you've done recently looks at the role of financial institutions and the financial system — and when we talk about that, we're talking about the global financial system — how it can be used to help police the movement or non-movement of these technologies across the world. How exactly does that work? Why is the financial system a useful lever to pull?
[7:13] Bryan Early: One of the challenges that would-be proliferators have is that almost no countries that possess chemical weapons or nuclear weapons or long-range missiles are going to sell them. Now, a shortcut to being able to build these capabilities is to go out and buy high-quality products from foreign suppliers that allow you to produce those products yourself. The existing policy tools that we have to try to stop that are strategic trade controls. Governments say to their firms, “If you want to sell these products, then you need to come to us and ask permission from us first for us to make sure that who you're selling it to is legitimate and what they're going to use it for is legitimate.” And so that's what we think of as a permission system. The other system that we have is harsher. Those are economic sanctions. There's a presumption of denial when sanctions are imposed that these particular actors or people in this state, they can't have access to trade in entire sectors or with our companies, or our individuals or our universities in our country.
The challenge with this is there are so many businesses that are involved in trade that it is very difficult for governments to be able to track all of the potential transactions that involve goods or technologies that could be misused. This new frontier that we're studying — proliferation financing controls — is about adding an additional layer to these existing defenses by involving financial institutions in providing oversight and scrutiny of the transactions that they facilitate to see whether the parties involved are potentially subject to sanctions, to see whether there are potential indicators or red flags that a diversion attempt is happening, and to use the fact that for international transactions to take place, there are far fewer large financial institutions in the world that are able to facilitate global trade, and many of them do business in U.S. dollars. So this U.S. dollar-led financial system means that there are chokepoints in these transactions, and f they're able to employ scrutiny on those particular transactions, they're able to be disruptors in a way that government regulators might not be able to pick up.
[9:44] Host: Is it truly possible to contain technology? I mean, are there examples of technologies that either the United States or other governments have effectively locked down?
[9:56] Bryan Early: So I think this is a great point of whether you're an optimist or a pessimist. Is the glass half full or half empty, and this goes back to your earlier question as well about why is a political scientist studying the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction? Well, the policy tools that we have, such as export controls, economic sanctions, proliferation financing controls are about making it harder for a proliferator to get access to the things they want, to, the technologies and goods, to slowing down the process to making it more costly, to creating greater uncertainty. If they're building a tank or a missile and they can't get this one widget that they need for a missile engine, then they don't have a missile. It's about slowing down the process from a technical standpoint so you can create space for political solution.
Really, for these weapons of mass destruction it's about getting a government to say “Okay, we won't acquire nuclear weapons,” or “We'll give our nuclear weapons up,” or “Okay, we're not going to have chemical weapons,” or countries within a region coming to a security agreement where they say, “None of us will have nuclear weapons.” Ultimately, you do have some actors out there that if they're dedicated and they have the time and effort, they can get these weapons. North Korea is a great example. They really single-mindedly have invested in rocketry and space capabilities and nuclear weapons, and they've had these programs going on for 40, 45 years, and through dedicated time and effort, they've eventually gotten there. So you can look at that and say, “Have all these efforts failed?” Well, yes, a determined actor over time eventually did get there, but it took them decades and decades. And so all these policies and political efforts at providing solutions, they have done a lot to reduce the total number of countries that have these dangerous capabilities, and they've made it a lot harder for the countries that have decided that they don't want to be part of that system to get these capabilities.
[12:00] Host: When we're talking about computer technology, and computer chips and AI, which is an enabling technology for an infinite number of things now, how do you wrap your arms around it when the enabling technology is so general and so powerful but can be used for almost an infinite number of legitimate or illegitimate things?
[12:20] Bryan Early: One of the things that's evolved for myself and my team at the Project on International Security, Commerce and Economic Statecraft is that when we started doing this work together 15-plus years ago, it was really black and white. You want to keep the missiles and nuclear weapons away from certain parties. What we're talking about now are these dual-use first technologies — they're fundamentally commercial, civilian technologies that, oh yeah, can be weaponized. And it's really hard in many cases to be able to determine what is an appropriate level of protection because the economic benefits of selling these capabilities are so great. You want prosperity with security, and there is some function there where you make sacrifices in terms of how widely you're willing to sell a product in return for security benefits of making sure certain actors who you're really concerned about how they will use it, don't get access to it.
Part of how my team has grown and evolved is now we are not only talking about strategic trade controls. We are talking with governments about foreign direct investment screening. Do you want a certain government to come into your country and acquire or purchase parts of your companies that are developing the next wave of AI technologies or computing technologies that, oh, yeah, they're not only going to have security applications, but this is your own economic prosperity we're talking about. Do you want a foreign government or a foreign investment fund to have large control, especially if that foreign government is actively involved in stealing technologies? And by this I mean China. There are other actors, but I mean this is one of the big ones in terms of the strategic rivalry between the United States and China right now. That's part of the messaging.
[14:19] Host: Are we just sort of locked in this essential game of cat and mouse where proliferators get better at evading whatever regulatory frameworks and sanctions we have in place, so we dream up new sanctions and regulatory frameworks? In other words, we're never going to win, but we can harass them enough —
[14:39] Bryan Early: I wrote a book about sanctions evasion. I use the term whack-a-mole. That's another kind of good example of how you can imagine it. It's that you stop one vulnerable point and then they find another one to attack, and so it's a trade-off and you obviously, if you're a financial institution, you want to make money. You want to sell to almost everybody. Yes, there are certain customers where if you get caught selling to them, you're going to be very embarrassed and publicly shamed outside of government regulation. But governments play a role in expanding that list to saying, “These are the certain activities that we don't want you to be facilitating or supporting, and we're going to make you pay the costs of screening for those transactions to make sure that your activities in conducting your business transactions are not facilitating these international crimes or financial crimes.”
I'll tell you the dark side of this. You have certain jurisdictions in the world where they don't have well-developed financial systems, so there's a higher risk that if you're conducting financial transactions to a place in sub-Saharan Africa, to a place in the South Pacific, that you don't know that the person on the other side of it isn't on a sanctions list. And financial institutions are making the decision that in some of these places the compliance costs to verify identities and to make sure that it's safe are viewed as being too high. And so this phenomenon is known as de-risking. Financial institutions, other businesses are saying, “We can't profitably do business in these places because of the regulations, so we're going to stop.” If you're trying to send money to help people who are suffering from a natural disaster in a place like Syria or Sudan or Somalia, it could be really hard to find a financial institution willing to facilitate those services. And so this consequence is actually now hurting some of the world's most vulnerable populations because they're being shut out of being able to engage in the global economy. When we started out this project, we're saying we want to do everything we can to prevent the risks of proliferation. We came to appreciate you can have too much of a good thing, that if you roll this out too stringently, then you're going to potentially be harming a lot of people in a guaranteed way to potentially minimize the risk in a potential way.
[17:02] Host: That was Bryan Early, a global arms control expert and professor of political science here at UAlbany. Bryan and his colleague Togzhan Kassenova's forthcoming book explores how banks can help thwart the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
To learn more about the technologies that worry Brian the most — and how crypto has been a boon to economically isolated nations like North Korea — be sure to check out The Longer Version in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including this week research by my colleague Maggie Hartley and audio production and editing by Scott Freedman in the UAlbany Digital Media studio, our secluded doomsday bunker deep inside the Podium tunnels.
We'll be back next week with another conversation about something interesting. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.