Amid the nightmare of a global pandemic and the crumbling pillars of nuclear arms control, the leadership of one of the few stars in the nuclear firmament still shining bright is due for vote in Vienna on 25–27 November.

On October 24, 75 years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the nuclear ban treaty. It will enter into force on January 22.

How accurate is it to call the current Sino–US hostility Cold War Two? Could it tip the world into a shooting war in which neither emerges victorious and everyone loses? In an agenda-resetting speech at the Hudson Institute in October 2018, US Vice President Mike Pence outlined a thick catalogue of predatory practices and aggressive behaviour by China.

The Cold War-era weapons governance structures are no longer fit for purpose. In contemporary geopolitics, nuclear dyads have become nuclear chains. In an increasingly polycentric global order, the current nuclear arms control structure, built on the idea that disarmament can be managed via trade-offs between pairs of states whose very survival is dependent on stable strategic dyads, neither regulates nor constrains the choices of other nuclear-armed states.