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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The world is entering a new nuclear age. Nuclear weapons are returning to the fore of international statecraft in ways unseen since the Cold War. With major powers like Russia issuing threats of nuclear strikes, China and North Korea continuing to grow their arsenals, and new prospects for proliferation from the Middle East to East Asia, the world has been thrust into a new era of heightened nuclear risk.
In this incisive book, international security expert Ankit Panda explores the enduring and emerging factors that are contributing to this new nuclear age. From strained great power ties to complex multipolar dynamics and the precipitous decline of arms control, he shows how our coexistence with the bomb is becoming more complicated and perilous. The prospect of nuclear escalation is again shaping how political decision-makers and military establishments around the world think and act. But unlike the peril of the Cold War, a greater number of nuclear players and a plethora of new technologies, including AI and exotic new weapons, make the search for stability far from straightforward. Managing the risks of a nuclear confrontation, he argues, will require new urgency and thinking to pull us back from the precipice of global catastrophe.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Opening quote
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Notes
1 Slouching Toward a New Nuclear Age
Order, proliferation, and growing malaise: The second nuclear age
The new third nuclear age
A most important task
Notes
2 From Terror, Peace
Nuclear deterrence: Unsatisfying, real, and risky
Deterrence and its discontents
Deterring limited nuclear use
Notes
3 Technology and Escalation
Missile defense
The means of delivery: Exotic and “fast” missiles
All in the zeroes and ones
Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence?
Space and nuclear escalation
Technology, flux, and stability
Notes
4 The New Nuclear Disorder
The origins of nuclear arms control
A break for U.S.–Russia arms control
The nonproliferation order
Alliances and extended deterrence
Notes
5 Nuclear Flashpoints
The Taiwan flashpoint
The South Asian tinderbox
North Korea’s arrival as a nuclear power
The looming specter of an Iranian bomb
Looking ahead
Notes
6 What to Do About the Bomb?
Testing patience
Rediscovering arms control
Rethinking verification
In favor of organizational change
Prudence at the core
Survival in the new nuclear age
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Opening quote
Abbreviations
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Lindsay, my partner in all things.
The New Nuclear Age
At the Precipice of Armageddon
ANKIT PANDA
polity
Copyright © Ankit Panda 2025The right of Ankit Panda to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5747-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024943101
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
War is the province of uncertainty …Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Be wary, then; best safety lies in fear.Hamlet, Act I, Scene III
Acknowledgments
On January 26, 2022, I received an email from Louise Knight, publisher at Polity. Louise introduced herself and asked if I’d given any thought to perhaps writing a “bold and incisive book of around 50,000 words” pulling together the many disquieting themes that appeared to be permeating global nuclear affairs at the time. That Louise chose to reach out when she did was serendipity: I had been giving precisely such a book careful thought at the time and essentially had an outline in mind already. From the Korean Peninsula to South Asia and the Pacific, my work on nuclear policy issues for the preceding years had persuaded me that the risk of nuclear war was rising. A month after my initial exchange with Louise, as Russia’s brutal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, backed by implicit nuclear threat-making, I began to conceptualize the outline of this book, convinced that the world was entering a dangerous new nuclear era. Without Louise’s initiative, however, I may never have written this book, and for that I owe her thanks – even if I exceeded her originally envisaged word count significantly.
Beyond Louise and her colleagues at Polity – especially, Inès Boxman, Olivia Jackson, and Aoibheann O’Flynn – I owe a debt of gratitude to several others for intellectually enriching me as I wrote this book. While the bulk of this book was written in Washington, DC, where I live and work, I was fortunate to be able to travel widely as I researched its contents, interviewing many officials, military planners, intelligence analysts, and nongovernmental experts to soak up their perspectives on the book’s themes. While many of these individuals would prefer to remain unnamed, I owe them my gratitude for their time. I am further grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided useful feedback on the initial concept note for this book and the draft manuscript. Their feedback helped tighten the screws and improved the final product. Finally, I am grateful to Sarah Dancy for her efforts copyediting the manuscript. Any and all errors that remain are my own.
Closer to home, I found myself constantly supported by my brilliant colleagues in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where I have been fortunate to work since 2020. I worried initially that I may have trouble persuading the inimitable George Perkovich of the value of this book, but I was wrong to do so: George was immediately supportive and provided trenchant feedback on my conceptual approach, without which this book would have been quite a bit worse off. My Carnegie colleagues James Acton, Toby Dalton, Jane Darby Menton, Nicole Grajewski, Jamie Kwong, Eli Levite, and Tong Zhao, meanwhile, were constant sources of encouragement and motivation. I am particularly grateful to Anna Bartoux, Sueli Gwiazdowski, Kylie Jones, Lisa Michelini, and Mackenzie Schuessler for their research and logistical support as I worked through the manuscript. I can think of no better intellectual home for myself than the Carnegie Endowment as I worked on this book. I am also grateful to Tino Cuellar and Dan Baer for their support. Lastly, I acknowledge the Stanton Foundation, which has been an essential backer of my work.
As I wrote this book, I was fortunate to find constant inspiration and new ideas after enriching conversations and written exchanges with many friends and colleagues around the world, several of whom I encountered for the first time after years of separation due to the pandemic. The old cliché that writing is a lonely endeavor has been far from true, in my experience. I owe much to those who took the time – over meals, drinks, coffees, Twitter exchanges, DMs, and on the sidelines of various conferences – to ruminate with me on the disquieting content that characterizes much of this book. I am grateful to Rabia Akhtar, Nobumasa Akiyama, Alexei Arbatov, Andrei Baklitskiy, Darshana Baruah, Alex Bell, Eric Brewer, Elena Chernenko, James Crabtree, John Emery, Ryan Evans, Karl Friedhoff, Franz-Stefan Gady, Markus Garlauskas, Matt Gentzel, Camille Grand, Matt Harries, Shashank Joshi, Jeongmin Kim, Matt Korda, Hans Kristensen, Ulrich Kühn, Jeffrey Lewis, Oliver Meier, Steve Miller, Adam Mount, Vipin Narang, Michiru Nishida, Chad O’Carroll, Pavel Podvig, Joshua Pollack, Andrew Reddie, Phil Reiner, Wu Riqiang, Carl Robichaud, Christian Ruhl, Victoria Samson, Lee Sang-hyun, Lee Sangkyu, Markus Schiller, Manpreet Sethi, Dmitry Stefanovich, Aaron Stein, Bruno Tertrais, Jiang Tianjiao, Jenny Town, Ashley Townshend, Pranay Vaddi, Jane Vaynman, Tristan Volpe, Heather Williams, Amy Woolf, and numerous others.
Finally, I owe an enduring debt of gratitude to my closest friends and family, whose support remains essential to all I do. My friends have kept me laughing and motivated: Alexis Garby, Jeffrey Hodes, Claire Klobucista, Ben Krueger, Zach Laub, Kevin Lizarazo, James McBride, Alex Ogier, Sumit Poudyal, Danielle Renwick, Kynan Rilee, Angel Rubio, Arthur Safira, Mike Sobin, Nitin Viswanathan, Mike Wong, and many others. My parents Sanjay and Minati, my brother Aman, my mother-in-law Marina, and my sister- and brother-in-law Elissa and Harley have been unconditionally supportive of my work. While they might not read this until they’re quite a bit older, I owe much to the little ones in my life: Ivan and Sabine. They’ve been a tremendous source of joy. (Another little creature, my cat Cat, will never read this, but deserves my thanks, nevertheless.) Lastly, nothing I do, including this book, would be possible without the love, support, and care of my partner and editor since high school, Lindsay. She tolerated the long nights I spent writing sequestered away in my office, the weeks I spent overseas communicating by video call as I worked, and much more. This book is for her.
Abbreviations
ABM
Anti-Ballistic Missile (Treaty)
ADS
Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability
AEC
Atomic Energy Commission
AI
artificial intelligence
CPGS
Conventional Prompt Global Strike
CRPF
Indian Central Reserve Policy Force
CTBT
Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty
ENCD
Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament
GMD
Ground-based Midcourse Defense
HCMs
hypersonic cruise missiles
HGVs
hypersonic glide vehicles
IAEA
International Atomic Energy Agency
ICBM
intercontinental ballistic missile
INF
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (Treaty)
IRGC
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Iran)
JCPOA
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
JeM
Jaish-e-Muhammad
LAC
Line of Actual Control
LEU
low-enriched uranium
LLMs
large language models
LoC
Line of Control
MIRV
multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NCA
National Command Authority (Pakistan)
New START
New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 2010
NMCC
National Military Command Center
NPR
Nuclear Posture Review
NPT
Nonproliferation Treaty
NTM
National Technical Means
SM-3
Standard Missile 3
TPNW
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
WPK
Workers’ Party of Korea
Introduction
Thirty-odd years of relative nuclear stability in the aftermath of the Cold War have given way to a new and challenging era of multipolar nuclear competition against the backdrop of rapid technological change. Our world faces a novel set of pressing challenges – many unprecedented and some familiar – affecting nuclear deterrence and global stability that may well persist through much of the twenty-first century. The collision and intermingling of these complex dynamics has contributed to an environment of increased nuclear dangers. The first nuclear age was defined by bipolar superpower competition between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The second nuclear age, after the conclusion of the Cold War, saw a transition to concern about stabilizing the former Soviet Union, preventing nuclear proliferation in South Asia and the Korean Peninsula, along with growing worries about possible nuclear or radiological terrorism. This period also coincided with the most rapid decrease in the nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia, which between them held, and continue to hold, more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, and created more hope than ever that gradual and total nuclear disarmament might be possible.
That hope gave way to greater pessimism as the 2020s began, and, in particular, as relations between Russia and China, on one side, and the West, on the other, have turned toward systemic confrontation. The decade beginning in 2020 marks a transition to a new, more dangerous, and more complex third nuclear age: a period that will be defined by the renewal of great power competitive dynamics, complex multipolar nuclear deterrence relationships, newly arrived and increasingly sophisticated actors like North Korea, and the anxieties introduced by the still-uncertain effects of a range of emerging technologies (such as hypersonic weapons, cyberweapons/artificial intelligence, and possible space weapons). The challenges of this new nuclear age will intensify in ways that are unlikely to be fully foreseeable as so-called “great power competition” between the United States, Russia, and China intensifies. The task of averting nuclear escalation and mitigating the possibility that nuclear weapons may realize their longstanding latent potential to pose global catastrophic risks to humanity’s long-term ability to grow and flourish will grow more urgent.
The very notion of nuclear “ages” is an artificial intellectual construct, of course, and one without any consensus or clear definition. Some have gone as far as to argue that the entire post-1945 era, in the aftermath of humanity’s acquisition of the bomb, represents the start of a new epoch entirely for the human race: the Anthropocene.1 The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, marked a clear break point for humanity’s initial dangerous coexistence with the bomb. The onset of the 1990s heralded a dissipation of the real, palpable, and even somewhat quotidian sense that the world as we knew it could end in a cataclysmic exchange of thousands of deployed nuclear weapons. As a result of bold, unilateral initiatives undertaken by the final Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his U.S. counterpart, President George H.W. Bush, thousands of nuclear weapons deployed outside the two countries’ borders were repatriated, introducing new firebreaks and decreasing the likelihood that future conventional crises between the United States and Russia could quickly go nuclear. The bomb, with its attendant anxieties, fundamentally, did not disappear, but its grip over the relationship between Moscow and Washington did. It was due to these changes that some later came to dub the period between the United States’ Trinity test in July 1945 and the moment of Soviet collapse “the first nuclear age.” This was a period characterized by intense, bipolar superpower nuclear competition between Washington and Moscow, the discovery of nuclear strategy, the adoption of a diverse means of nuclear weapons delivery, and the invention of nuclear arms control. The lessons of the first nuclear age continue to bear relevance, even though they have been forgotten among many policymakers and military planners, who have had the luxury of turning their attention away from nuclear weapons to other global security challenges in the decades after the Cold War.
The bipolar superpower clash between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War took place under the shadow of the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads that the two cumulatively built over the years. The idea of “victory” in a full-scale war between these two powers had little meaning in this world. As one U.S. top secret national security memorandum in 1977 put it, the “results of a major nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union are that both nations would suffer very high levels of damage and neither could conceivably be described as a ‘winner’.”2 The memo continued: this was “true regardless of who strikes first, or whether the attack is a surprise or occurs after a period of warning.” This two-player game was costly and dangerous, and held the potential to put an end to human civilization as we knew it – but Moscow and Washington were able to derive certain rules of the road to prevent a plunge into the abyss. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation became the Soviet successor state to inherit its nuclear arsenal. In the three decades that followed the end of the Cold War, however, a third major power, China, has quickly emerged as a major global player in its own right. From 1990 through the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Chinese gross domestic product grew at an average of 9 percent per year, lifting hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese citizens out of poverty and into unprecedented middle-class prosperity. As might then be expected, China’s newfound national prosperity largely proportionately translated into greater spending on the country’s military forces, commensurate with its growing status and resources. Chinese leaders authorized new programs of defense research and development, and began modernizing the country’s armed forces along several axes. Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader who took over as generalsecretary of the Communist Party of China in 2012, repeatedly called for the country to field a “world-class military.”3 This was a particular priority for Xi, who appeared to move away from every preceding Chinese paramount leader going back to the country’s founder, Mao Zedong, on the appropriate role for China’s military instrument as a tool of political influence on the global stage.
By the mid-2010s, the United States had come to view Chinese foreign policy ambitions with skepticism, and it became increasingly clear that Washington and Beijing were at odds over fundamental questions ranging from the nature of the international order to China’s place within that order. While, in the 2000s, the United States had chosen to engage with China and encourage it to find accommodation in the existing post-Cold War global order as a “responsible stakeholder”4 within that order, Beijing appeared to have more substantial ambitions to shape that order in ways inimical to the interests of the United States, its allies, and its partners. By the mid-2010s, China had started to behave in more assertive ways in its immediate neighborhood. Territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas with Japan and a number of Southeast Asian claimant states began to flare as Beijing constructed artificial islands, harassed civilian and military ships with its navy and maritime law enforcement vessels, and carried out unsafe aerial intercepts against U.S. and other military aircraft operating legally in international airspace.
Despite the growing confrontation between the United States and China in those years, there was still an element of compartmentalization in the relationship that allowed Washington and Beijing to collaborate on matters of global importance, such as climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. Most importantly, the economic relationship between the two countries remained on a strong footing; China manufactured and the United States consumed. This compartmentalization and generally positive economic relationship took a substantial hit beginning with the election of U.S. President Donald J. Trump in 2017. The Trump administration initiated a trade war against China and broadly sought to insulate the U.S. economy from Beijing. The administration more broadly took a far more openly hostile tone toward Beijing, going as far as to criticize the nature of China’s communist political system and its leadership directly. By the time the Trump administration entered its final months in office, the Chinese leadership appeared concerned enough about a potential deliberately initiated conflict by the United States that the chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff at the time, General Mark Milley, contacted his Chinese counterpart to offer reassurances to the contrary.5
It is against this backdrop that China’s transition into this new nuclear age manifested itself in what is likely to be the most essential driver of enduring and new, global-scale nuclear risks. After decades of fielding a limited nuclear arsenal – comprising just a fraction of the warheads fielded by the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War – China changed course and is now seeking a much larger force. Beijing’s choice in this regard stands to shift the center of gravity in global nuclear affairs away from Europe and toward Asia, where six of the nine states that possess nuclear weapons have territory or regularly carry out substantial military operations. Substantial evidence suggests that China has shaken off its traditional preference for a smaller nuclear force, and that Beijing is pursuing an unprecedented quantitative expansion of its nuclear arsenal. U.S. intelligence assessments, as of 2024, estimated that China will build up to a force comprising some 1,500 nuclear warheads by the mid-2030s, although one senior U.S. military intelligence official involved in assessing Chinese nuclear modernization plans told me that substantial uncertainty still persists about the intentions of the Chinese leadership when it comes to the intended total size of this force.6 While the 1,500 number will still see China field fewer strategic nuclear warheads than the United States and Russia in 2024, the combination of this change in the country’s nuclear forces and possibly strategy, paired with the broader force of geopolitical contest that have Washington and Beijing at loggerheads, will contribute to a dangerous cocktail of nuclear risk in future crises and, if the event arises, war.
Historically, China’s approach to nuclear weapons diverged considerably with that of the United States and the Soviet Union from its very origins. The day after China’s first nuclear test in October 1964, the country’s official Xinhua News Agency carried a statement noting that Beijing had sought nuclear weapons with the first objective of deterring attacks against its territory. The statement also included a statement that Beijing had “solemnly declare[d] that [it] will never at any time and under any circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons.”7 This pledge, the first of its kind, introduced the idea of a “no first-use” nuclear weapons policy. A second important consideration for China in its original pursuit of nuclear weapons was to resist what its leaders perceived as unjust nuclear coercion by the United States. Mao Zedong, China’s first paramount leader, was particularly perturbed by Washington’s brandishing of nuclear capabilities in the course of the final months of the Korean War, and the first and second Taiwan Strait Crises (1954–5 and 1958).8 Before testing the bomb, the newly created People’s Republic had no satisfying answer to American threats to potentially use nuclear weapons. Acquiring the bomb was meant to address this problem initially. From its very origins, however, China’s approach to nuclear strategy diverged considerably from that of every other nuclear-armed state at the time. Beijing’s declaration of a no first-use policy meant, in essence, that Chinese leaders were exclusively planning for a nuclear force that could absorb a first strike and still have a retaliatory capability to deliver what they believed to be sufficiently unacceptable damage as to have a deterrent effect on a prospective attacker. In the years after China’s initial nuclear test, however, the country’s scientists and engineers worked to develop better, more capable nuclear warheads and delivery systems. By the early 1970s, China had started to flight-test intercontinental-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. homeland. In July 1996, China carried out its forty-fifth and last nuclear test, after which it signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and committed to cease all nuclear testing.9 Despite this, it continued to modernize its broader military capabilities and adjusted its nuclear forces in ways to ensure their ability to meet the criteria for assuring “effective counterattack”; one example of this included the adoption of multiple nuclear warheads on certain missiles to cope with possible U.S. missile defense systems.10
Apart from its idiosyncratic approach to nuclear strategy privileging assured retaliation at the expense of nearly all other possible roles and objectives for nuclear weapons, China also kept the numbers of its nuclear forces rather modest. In 2020, for instance, the U.S. Department of Defense publicly released an authoritative assessment that Washington believed China had a nuclear force numbering warheads in the “low-200s.”11 This number actually was considerably lower than open-source estimates by independent researchers at the time, who had suggested that China had as many as 290–350 nuclear warheads.12 By way of comparison, a single American Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, if fully uploaded with nuclear warheads, could carry 160 nuclear warheads alone. (In practice, contemporary U.S. submarines deploy with far fewer warheads due to constraints imposed by arms control agreements.) Unlike the Soviet Union, which coped by building a massive nuclear arsenal that could not be disarmed effectively by a U.S. first strike, leaders in Beijing chose to tolerate unusually high levels of vulnerability to a disarming strike. This modestly sized Chinese nuclear force had a benefit for U.S. war planners, who were able to largely consider Beijing’s nuclear forces as a so-called “lesser included case” of the targeting problems they faced vis-à-vis Russia. This phrase, used frequently by U.S. military planners, implied that the problem of Chinese nuclear weapons was largely insignificant for the purposes of U.S. force planning, given the substantially more complex, larger arsenal possessed by Russia – or, differently put, that any U.S. nuclear force sufficiently capable of holding at-risk targets in Russia could do the same for China.
The “third player” problem for the nuclear superpowers is meaningfully new, unprecedented, and a likely contributor to dangerous new risks. As I researched and wrote this book, I traveled to meet officials and thinkers around the world to discuss matters concerning the themes explored herein. Consistently, China’s shifting nuclear posture raised great concerns – from Washington, to London, to Berlin, to New Delhi, to Singapore, to Seoul, and to Tokyo. In the United States, China’s shifting nuclear posture has launched a new wave of thinking on nuclear deterrence in what many have come to call a “two-peer” (or “two near-peer”) environment. While Beijing’s arrival as a U.S. nuclear peer is contestable given the vast gap that will remain quantitively even if China should build up to the highest-end U.S. intelligence estimates of its intentions, the questions raised for the United States and its allies are significant. Finally, as U.S.–Russian relations enter their worst period since the end of the Cold War, exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 decision to launch an invasion of Ukraine, anxieties have surged in Washington about possible Russia–China cooperation on nuclear matters. Russia has already assisted China with developing an early warning architecture,13 and the leaders of the two countries famously declared a “no limits” partnership just nineteen days before President Putin proceeded with his invasion of Ukraine without apparently having informed the Chinese president.14 Despite their public exhortations, the two countries are far from allies, and mistrust lingers between them.15 Leaked Russian military documents, for instance, have revealed that Russia continues to see China as a possible military threat itself and has carried out major military exercises to thwart a possible Chinese invasion of its territory.16 Forging a stable nuclear balance in this emerging, difficult world will require new thinking, political courage, and, above all, prudence.
While dynamics between the United States, Russia, and China are central to this new nuclear age, the risks of nuclear proliferation and war implicate a far greater number of states. Increasingly, technologically sophisticated non-nuclear states may have the capability to raise the risk of nuclear escalation by threatening the nuclear forces of a number of countries. Some of these countries are allies of the United States and have started to domestically debate the possibility of seeking their own nuclear weapons, perceiving long-term political dysfunction in Washington as an unacceptable risk to the reliability of their chief ally. Regional nuclear tinderboxes, from South Asia to the Korean Peninsula, have continued to fester without meaningful guardrails or confidence-building mechanisms. Finally, military and policy planners across nuclear-armed states bear anxieties about the potential role of rapid technological change on the nuclear balance – from emerging artificial intelligence capabilities to the proliferation of new missile defense and space technologies.
Cumulatively, these trends have rapidly thrust nuclear weapons back to the forefront of international politics after their general recession into the background in the three decades following the end of the Cold War. Not all matters that will permeate this new nuclear age are “new” – old problems concerning nuclear deterrence, limited nuclear use, and crisis management are rearing their heads – but the intersection and simultaneous culmination of these dynamics as the world enters the middle of the twenty-first century present unprecedented risks. Across the six chapters that ensue, this book seeks to answer a number of questions. First, what exactly is meaningfully “new” about the nuclear age that appears to be dawning in the 2020s? How much is this a resurgence of old, long-forgotten problems? Second, what unique trends, dynamics, and features characterize this new nuclear age? Finally, what are the long-term implications for humanity, and what steps might help mitigate the risks of nuclear war in an era of unparalleled complexity? Ensuring that nuclear weapons remain unused against this dangerous backdrop will become increasingly challenging.
Notes
1.
Dylan Spaulding, “The Anthropocene as a Nuclear Age,”
The Equation
(November 2, 2023).
2.
“Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC-10,” National Security Archive (February 18, 1977);
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/media/28643/ocr
.
3.
M. Taylor Fravel, “China’s ‘World-Class Military’ Ambitions: Origins and Implications,”
The Washington Quarterly
43, no. 1 (January 2, 2020): 85–99.
4.
Robert Zoellick, “Whither China: From Membership to Responsibility?” Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State (September 21, 2005);
https://2001-2009.state.gov/s/d/former/zoellick/rem/53682.htm
. Amitai Etzioni, “Is China a Responsible Stakeholder?”
International Affairs
(Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–) 87, no. 3 (May 2011): 539–53.
5.
Andrew Desiderio, “Milley: Beijing’s Fears of U.S. Attack Prompted Call to Chinese General,”
POLITICO
(September 28, 2021).
6.
Author’s interview with a U.S. military intelligence official in 2023.
7.
“Statement by Peking on Nuclear Test,”
New York Times
(October 17, 1964), sec. Archives.
8.
Rosemary J. Foot, “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean Conflict,”
International Security
13, no. 3 (1988): 92–112.
9.
Thomas C. Reed, “The Chinese Nuclear Tests, 1964–1996,”
Physics Today
61, no. 9 (September 1, 2008): 47–53.
10.
For a deeper exploration of these trends, see
Missile Technology: Accelerating Challenges
(IISS, December 2022), Ch. 5;
https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/strategic-dossiers/mdi-missile-technology-accelerating-challenges/
.
11.
Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2021
, Annual Report to Congress, Office of the Secretary of Defense, p. 92;
https://media.defense.gov/2021/Nov/03/2002885874/-1/-1/0/2021-cmpr-final.pdf
.
12.
See, for instance, Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris (2018) “Chinese Nuclear Forces,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
74, no. 4 (June 28, 2018): 289–95, and Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Nuclear Notebook: Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2020,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
76, no. 6 (2020): 443–57.
13.
Dmitry Stefanovich, “Russia to Help China Develop an Early Warning System,”
The Diplomat
(October 25, 2019).
14.
President of Russia, “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development” (February 4, 2022);
http://www.en.kremlin.ru/supplement/5770
.
15.
Patricia M. Kim, “The Limits of the No-Limits Partnership,”
Foreign Affairs
(February 28, 2023).
16.
Max Seddon and Chris Cook, “How Russia War-Gamed a Chinese Invasion,”
Financial Times
(February 29, 2024), sec. FT Investigations.
1Slouching Toward a New Nuclear Age
In December 1942, the Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi watched in awe as the first manmade nuclear chain reaction was initialized. Fermi’s experiment – part of the Manhattan Project that would lead to the creation of the first nuclear weapon – was an inflection point for humankind.1 Fermi had experimentally validated what the Austrian physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch had discovered four years prior. Fission, the phenomenon in question, involves the splitting of the nucleus of an atom. For two isotopes of two particular elements – uranium-235 and plutonium-239 – fission was found to release additional, excess neutrons. These excess neutrons, in turn, could trigger additional fission reactions – and so on. Engineered appropriately, this phenomenon presented a potential for weaponization unlike anything ever seen on Earth before. And so, under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, the United States built two designs: one based on a cylindrical formation of uranium-235 designed to be “shot” at an analogous target; the other based on a spherical plutonium-239 core surrounded by shaped explosive charges. Because scientists were practically certain the first design would work, but less so about the second, a test was carried out in the desert of the U.S. state of New Mexico. On July 16, 1945, under J. Robert Oppenheimer’s guidance, the United States detonated the “gadget,” an implosion-design plutonium bomb. This test, codenamed Trinity, marked the first nuclear detonation on Earth. The weapon worked. On August 6, the United States dropped Little Boy, the uranium-235-based bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, incinerating tens of thousands of human beings instantly. Three days later, the Fat Man device, based on the “gadget,” was dropped on Nagasaki, another Japanese city, killing tens of thousands yet again. More than 100,000 people perished as the United States announced the power of atomic weaponry to the world.2 The nuclear age had dawned and matters of war and peace between the major powers would never quite be as they were in the past.
After the Soviet Union broke the United States’ initial few years of nuclear monopoly in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project and the Second World War with its first nuclear test in 1949, bipolar superpower nuclear competition came to define a new type of risk in global politics: a risk without precedent. In those initial years, leaders and military planners in Moscow and Washington didn’t know fully what exactly to do about the bomb – or how to reap its putative political benefits – and the imperfect art of nuclear strategy hardly materialized overnight. Technological changes – the arrival of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), naval nuclear propulsion, and space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, to name a few – rapidly influenced the nuclear balance between the two. By the early 1980s, the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union had led to their aggregate nuclear forces ballooning to nearly 70,000 nuclear weapons, driven by often perverse strategic logics mandating ever more nuclear weapons for the other side’s growing array of targets. At this time, just a few hundred nuclear weapons – in total – were possessed by four other states that were thought to have developed weaponized nuclear bombs: the United Kingdom, China, France, and Israel. The aggregate megatonnage in the Soviet and American arsenals manifested in the early 1980s represented – and continues to represent – the greatest accumulation of manmade potential destructive energy ever amassed.3
The first nuclear age not only marked the discovery and evolution of nuclear strategy, including nuclear deterrence, but also its various necessary accompaniments, including arms control, a nonproliferation architecture to keep the bomb from spreading uncontrollably, and the development of collective security arrangements backed by nuclear weapons. The logic of nuclear restraint was not obvious at the dawn of this age, however. Over thirteen days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any point prior. The Cuban Missile Crisis, now unanimously recalled as the most dangerous moment of the Cold War and of the nuclear age writ large, was a rude awakening for American and Soviet leaders alike about the need to actively manage the risk of hurtling themselves – and the world – into nuclear apocalypse. The logic of nuclear deterrence could hardly be automatically relied on to prevent the occurrence of war, especially when leaders like U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev felt compelled to push their luck. In the ensuing years, Washington and Moscow – though they remained bitter, ideological foes with little in terms of a shared vision for the world – discovered arms control to be a useful means for addressing the problem of preventing a nuclear war that neither of their leaders wanted. Arms control had other benefits as well: it bounded the scope of what could otherwise have been an even more intense arms race. Finally, arms control would contribute eventually to the elimination of certain nuclear weapons entirely, reducing the risk of nuclear war and the damage that might ensue should deterrence fail.
It was also during this period that the United States entered the business of assuring other leaders that its nuclear weapons could be relied on for the defense of their territory and interests. In 1949, the United States, Canada, and a group of West European countries established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At the core of NATO was the idea of collective defense: that an attack on one ally equated to an attack on all allies. The United States, having emerged triumphant from the Second World War as a global superpower and now armed with nuclear weapons, ensured that its assurances would be backed with nuclear weapons. As the Soviet nuclear threat intensified and various crises emerged in Europe – notably, over the fate of a divided Berlin – Washington found itself adapting to new realities, first by brandishing its nuclear weapons, and then by forward-basing those weapons on allied soil. Eventually, the introduction of Soviet ICBMs further intensified concerns among some allies that the vulnerability of the American homeland to nuclear attack could dissuade a U.S. president from coming through for NATO. In 1961, French President Charles de Gaulle famously asked President Kennedy if the United States “would be ready to trade New York for Paris.”4 Washington failed to assuage French concerns at the time, prompting, in part, De Gaulle’s decision to leave NATO and pursue at full-bore an independent nuclear deterrent.
Other allies – notably, West Germany – sought greater input on how NATO might rely on or employ U.S. nuclear weapons.5 Washington and its NATO allies adapted by expanding the scope of allied involvement in nuclear planning within the alliance, and even by adopting nuclear sharing arrangements, whereby U.S. nuclear weapons – with U.S. authorization – could be operated by allied European forces. The Soviet Union tolerated this measure insofar as it mitigated the risk of West Germany itself seeking the bomb: Khrushchev himself, in 1963, internally justified the Soviet position to members of the Warsaw Pact by suggesting that it would be tolerable “as long as the West German revanchists’ hands would be bound with regard to nuclear weapons by an agreement on non-proliferation.”6 Beyond NATO, Washington also forged alliances in East Asia, with South Korea and Japan. Neither state faced the same prospect of an imminent invasion by a nuclear-armed state at the time as frontline NATO states did, but North Korea maintained conventional military superiority in the period after the Korean War that eventually led the United States to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea beginning in 1958.7 Washington continued to rely on its assurances to its allies as a nonproliferation tool; but in the mid-1970s, the United States detected a covert attempt by South Korean President Park Chung-hee to develop nuclear weapons. Washington coerced South Korea into refraining from pursuing the bomb and maintained forward-deployed conventional and nuclear forces to deter Pyongyang.8
While bipolar competition between Washington and Moscow characterized the central fulcrum of the first nuclear age, this was also the period that marked the proliferation of worldwide interest in nuclear technology and weaponry. Although only nine states possess nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century, at least twenty others flirted with the bomb to varying degrees through the latter half of the twentieth century.9 Concern about the bomb’s spread manifested at the very start of the first nuclear age and found global carriage. In 1959, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution – put forth by Ireland – that called on any state possessing nuclear weapons at the time to refrain from sharing that technology with non-nuclear states.10 Out of a shared concern that the bomb’s spread would be detrimental to their interests, the United States and the Soviet Union came together to promote the development of a global treaty on nuclear non-proliferation. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or the NPT, still stands as the cornerstone of the global nonproliferation regime. With 191 signatories, the NPT is the world’s largest and most successful nuclear arms control treaty.
Order, proliferation, and growing malaise: The second nuclear age
When the Cold War ended, the bomb didn’t go away, but the dark shadow it cast on the globe certainly receded. This recession was in one sense quite literal: reciprocal nuclear reductions by the United States and the newly formed Russian Federation in the first years of the 1990s resulted in the most dramatic reduction of deployed nuclear forces that the world had ever seen. What had been an undisputed arms race for many of the previous three decades came to be described by at least some observers as a “disarmament race.”11 Momentum on controlling and limiting nuclear arms carried over from the final years of the Cold War. The late Michael Krepon, a committed American practitioner and theorist of arms control, dubbed the period between 1987 and 2000 the “golden age of nuclear arms control.”12
The nuclear age had made a turn and entered what one analyst termed in 2000 a “second act”;13 new themes came to define nuclear anxieties and hopes alike. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for instance, did lead to the drawdown of nuclear weapons, but it also resulted in significant concerns about the prospects for Soviet nuclear weapons that could go missing in the course of the political tumult that followed. A related concern was the matter of ensuring that nuclear weapons that remained on the territory of certain former Soviet successor states – Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine – could be effectively repatriated to Russia. The U.S. Congress appropriated billions to support these efforts in what came to be known as the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, named after the two senators from opposing political parties who came together to address the urgent risks stemming from Soviet collapse. In the end, the program successfully dismantled more than 7,500 nuclear warheads and more than 1,500 land- and sea-launched strategic nuclear missiles, and ensured that remaining weapons were accounted for and secured.
The relative nuclear optimism of the immediate post-Cold War period also manifested itself in significant advances in nuclear global governance and the related universalization of norms around nuclear weaponry. In 1995, those states that were party to the NPT agreed to indefinitely extend that agreement, reflecting what at the time was a real sense that general nuclear disarmament was tractable, possible, and desirable. (After all, the United States and the Soviet Union had just pulled back thousands of nuclear weapons that had previously been deployed.) This was also a moment for the five nuclear weapon states recognized under the treaty – those that had detonated nuclear devices prior to January 1, 1967 – to offer so-called negative security assurances to the world’s non-nuclear weapon states.14 The United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom committed, as a measure to buttress nuclear nonproliferation, not to threaten non-nuclear weapon states with their own nuclear arms. In 1996, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty was opened for signature, seeking to end once and for all nuclear explosive testing – another measure that came to be seen as a catalyst for disarmament. Other advances in this time were a function of negative developments. For instance, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s failure to detect Iraq’s work on nuclear weapons prior to the Cold War led to the introduction of an Additional Protocol to the Agency’s standard Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, which sought to monitor any diversion of peaceful nuclear material for possible weapons purposes. The subsequent adoption of these Additional Protocols by a number of states substantially strengthened the Agency’s ability to verify that the full scope of nuclear activities within participating states remained of a peaceful nature.
As during the Cold War, nuclear proliferation continued to be a major concern in the early years of the second nuclear age. In 1989, South Africa, in the course of its post-Apartheid political transition to a majority-elected African National Congress-led government, abandoned its nuclear weapons program and voluntarily dismantled six nuclear weapons – the only state to date to have completely disarmed after assembling nuclear weapons.15 Just as South Africa joined the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state in 1991, the United States acquired strong intelligence indications that North Korea under leader Kim Il Sung was likely interested in developing nuclear weapons. This sparked a crisis that ultimately resulted in a 1994 agreement between Pyongyang and Washington to limit the former’s potential pathway to the bomb through the reprocessing of spent natural uranium fuel from a reactor that had come online in 1986. That agreement would later collapse, leading to an acceleration in North Korea’s sprint toward the bomb. In 2006, Pyongyang became the first – and, as of 2024, the only – new state to detonate a nuclear explosive device in the twenty-first century. After much attempted diplomacy, no effort to constrain North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons seemed likely to endure.
Iran presented another archetypal case of nonproliferation concern. Following the discovery of a covert uranium enrichment facility in the early 2000s, Iran and the major powers entered more than a decade of protracted on-again/off-again negotiations. Through a combination of deft, international diplomacy, secret backchannels activated by the United States, and a change of political circumstances with Iran, Tehran and a group of countries known as the P5+1 – comprising the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany – made a breakthrough in 2013, agreeing to an interim agreement known as the Joint Plan of Action that set up the building blocks for an agreement that would later trade relief from national and international economic sanctions for Tehran in exchange for concessions relating to the country’s civil nuclear program, including monitoring transparency. In 2015, the P5+1 and Iran cinched the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which, over some 150 pages, codified a wide range of verifiable technical constraints of Tehran’s programs and capabilities in exchange for sanctions relief. While the JCPOA represented a breakthrough on longstanding nonproliferation concerns pertaining to Tehran, it was heavily politicized in the United States. In May 2018, President Trump announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the JCPOA despite the United States having certified Iran’s compliance with the agreement that same year. The JCPOA’s unraveling came as the second nuclear age concluded, raising the uncomfortable prospect of a tenth nuclear-armed state: Iran.
Through much of the 1990s, the United States and other states remained concerned about the possibility of a nuclear breakout by South Asian neighbors and rivals India and Pakistan. India’s decision to carry out what it called a “peaceful nuclear explosion” in 1974 had galvanized Pakistani efforts to build nuclear weapons in the final years of the Cold War. By the late-1980s, Pakistan was “two screwdriver turns” from a working nuclear weapon.16 India, too, by the end of the Cold War had made significant progress and had started testing missiles intended to carry nuclear weapons. The two countries kept their nuclear capabilities in a non-weaponized state until May 1998. That month, India, under the nationalist leadership of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Bharatiya Janata Party, carried out its first weaponized nuclear tests, realizing what had been a campaign pledge. Pakistan responded days later with nuclear tests of its own. The nuclear age had thus arrived in South Asia, expanding the ledger of nuclear-armed states by two. One year after these tests, the two countries fought a war – the fourth since their independence in 1947. The prospect of a conventional conflict between South Asia’s two new nuclear states escalating into a nuclear war was a prominent theme of the second nuclear age – particularly in the 2000s and 2010s.
Another prominent theme of the second nuclear age was the eruption of concern about acts of nuclear terrorism by nonstate actors. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda terrorists on New York and Washington, DC, the United States grew particularly concerned on this front. Counterterrorism, in all its forms, quickly acquired salience in Washington – much as nuclear strategy once did during the first nuclear age – as the George W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror took hold. Paired with proliferation in Pakistan, where concerns about nuclear weapons security were particularly acute, states were alert to the prospect of nonstate groups seeking to procure nuclear materials. The audacity and scale of the September 11 attacks suggested to many that this was not outside the realm of the possible. Even if terrorists did not successfully create a nuclear weapon, they might seek to sow mayhem through the detonation of a radiological dispersal device, a conventional explosive enriched with radioactive material – sometimes known as a “dirty bomb”. Later, under the presidency of Barack Obama, the United States held global summits on nuclear security, seeking to ensure that all states in possession of sensitive nuclear material could adhere to best practices.
Despite the de-emphasis on great power nuclear competitive dynamics at the height of the second nuclear age in Washington and elsewhere, new sources of stress that would come to strain U.S.–Russia and U.S.–China nuclear relations began to emerge. In 1998, North Korea launched a satellite technology demonstrator, the Taepodong-1, over Japan, seeding in the minds of American policymakers the prospect that it may one day field a nuclear-armed ICBM. Disturbed by this possibility – and the prospect of a similar capability one day being fielded by Iran – the United States began moving toward the adoption of a homeland missile defense system. On December 13, 2001, President George W. Bush, citing “a vastly different world,” withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which had limited the missile defense capabilities of Russia and the United States in a bid to stabilize their nuclear deterrence relationship at the height of the Cold War.17
