Ominous developments in the strategic environment have reinvigorated a desire for innovative approaches to analyzing nuclear strategy and crisis stability. To address these challenges, RAND researchers conceived and prototyped a new model: the RAND Ontological Model for Assessing Nuclear Crisis Escalation Risk (ROMANCER). This report describes the motivation and theoretical underpinnings behind ROMANCER and provides some notional outputs.

The RAND Ontological Model for Assessing Nuclear Crisis Escalation Risk (ROMANCER)

Theoretical Introduction and Background

Edward Geist, Dahlia Anne Goldfeld, Gary J. Briggs, Nancy Huerta, Jim Mignano, Nina Miller

ResearchPublished Dec 16, 2025

Ominous developments in the strategic environment—including China’s rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Korean nuclear threats, and heightened tensions between Israel and Iran—have reinvigorated a desire for innovative approaches to analyzing nuclear strategy and crisis stability at multiple levels of the U.S. government and the Department of War. To address these challenges, RAND researchers conceived and prototyped a new model: the RAND Ontological Model for Assessing Nuclear Crisis Escalation Risk (ROMANCER). This report describes the motivation and theoretical underpinnings behind ROMANCER and provides some notional outputs.

Although Cold War analysts cultivated many methods for assessing nuclear crisis stability, such as wargaming and game theory, these methods all suffer from shortcomings, including high costs, poor reproducibility, or difficulty representing a multipolar strategic environment. ROMANCER represents an attempt to harness the potential of present-day computers to pioneer a new method with a combination of strengths that make it possible to analyze problems resistant to earlier approaches.

ROMANCER is implemented as a suite of interconnected Python modules and tools, developed to enhance the understanding of nuclear escalation risk and to provide a structured and repeatable framework for analyzing decisionmaking processes in high-stake situations. ROMANCER serves to aid U.S. planning and decisionmaking.

Key Findings

  • ROMANCER adds to a decades-long canon of nuclear escalation modeling. It is inspired by the 1970s RAND Strategy Assessment System model but is far less focused on a detailed operational picture and is instead centered on the cognitive and social-emotional component of nuclear actor interactions.
  • ROMANCER is not designed to predict the responses of specific leaders or the outcomes of specific scenarios.
  • ROMANCER allows analysts, developers, and researchers to test various assumptions about decisionmaking in crises and to gauge risks associated with different courses of action by simulating interactions between agents representing different decisionmaking entities in the context of a simulated environment.
  • ROMANCER demonstrates that agent-based simulation is a viable approach for investigating strategic dilemmas that resist analysis by traditional methods.
  • ROMANCER is not designed to identify good strategies but rather to flag risky strategies that present higher risk of escalation than is intuitive for such reasons as misperception and irrational decisionmaking.
  • ROMANCER as currently developed is a prototype, and there are many avenues for productive expansion.
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Geist, Edward, Dahlia Anne Goldfeld, Gary J. Briggs, Nancy Huerta, Jim Mignano, and Nina Miller, The RAND Ontological Model for Assessing Nuclear Crisis Escalation Risk (ROMANCER): Theoretical Introduction and Background. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2673-1.html.
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The research reported here was commissioned by Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) A5/8 and conducted within the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE.

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