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.

Within a short time, perhaps by year’s end, 50 of the current 84 signatories to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (the TPNW) will complete their ratification processes, bringing the TPNW into force. None of the nine States currently possessing nuclear weapons has expressed any positive interest in the Treaty, continuing with impunity to reject every effort by the international community at beginning the process of nuclear disarmament. When the TPNW enters into force, it will for the first time present the entire international community – including the nine nuclear-armed States (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) – with a fait accompli, a legal framework intended to encourage progress toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons, to verify every step taken, to detect cheating, and to celebrate advances towards peace and stability.