After an attack on its main nuclear facility in Natanz on 11 April, very likely by Israel, President Hasan Rouhani said that Iran will begin enriching uranium to 60 per cent. From a technical point of view, that would put Iran within a short sprint to full-fledged weapon-grade (90 per cent) of uranium enrichment.

Myanmar has a history of coups and long periods of military rule. The depth, size and persistence of the protests means a return to civilian control of the government is not an impossibility, but the legacy of past military brutality means indefinite junta rule is also possible.

This is not an article I had expected, intended or wanted to write. I have politely declined requests to write on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in relation to the current crisis in Myanmar and the climbing civilian death toll. The turning point was visuals of people with R2P banners, T-shirts, umbrellas and candle-lit vigils, as in the photo accompanying this article. The images have touched my conscience and should pull at the world’s conscience.

In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index published in early February, the world’s top five democracies are Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand and Canada. North Korea sits triumphantly at the bottom. India is classified as one of the world’s 52 ‘flawed democracies’. Its score dropped from 7.92 in 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power to 6.61 last year, and its global ranking slipped from 27th to 53rd among 167 countries surveyed in 2020.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan noted the nuclear emperor had no clothes: “The only value in our two nations [U.S. and Soviet Union] possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely”? Indeed it would. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) tries to do so through a new normative settling point on the ethics, legality and legitimacy of the bomb.

Critics of nuclear weapons have long pointed to two sets of risks. First, deterrence stability depends on all fail-safe mechanisms working every single time in every bomb-possessing country. That is an impossibly high bar for nuclear peace to hold indefinitely. Second, it also requires that rational decision-makers be in office in all the world’s nine nuclear-armed states.