Garrett Hinck is a PhD candidate in Political Science with a focus in International Relations at Columbia University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. His research examines how intelligence collection shapes strategic stability between nuclear-armed great powers, bridging Cold War nuclear competition to contemporary debates about emerging technologies, transparency, and arms control.
His dissertation, “Cyber, Signal, Satellite, Spy: Intelligence Collection and Stability in Nuclear Rivalries,” argues that collection technologies influence whether intelligence reduces or heightens the dangers of great power competition by shaping whether spying provokes its target and whether leaders can reveal what they have learned. He tests the theory with an original dataset of the methods great powers have used to collect on strategic forces since 1945 and archival case studies of Cold War U.S. strategic intelligence.
He was an AIxNuclear Fellow at the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab and Council on Strategic Risks from 2025 to 2026, and a Hans J. Morgenthau pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame from 2024 to 2025. Previously, he worked at the RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His work has been published in War on the Rocks, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lawfare, the Journal of National Security Law and Policy, and the Washington Post, and by the RAND Corporation, the Council on Strategic Risks, and the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. He holds a B.S. from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
