Policy Briefs on Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament

This Policy Brief describes the journey from the prioritisation of nuclear nonproliferation in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to the reprioritisation of nuclear disarmament in the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW or Ban Treaty). It then discusses the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the global discourse over the utility and limits of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and as tools of coercive diplomacy. Finally, it addresses the question: What does all this mean for the agenda of UN reforms?

This Policy Brief, in classic thriller style, looks at means, opportunity and, most revealingly, motive of the suspects in the Nordstream sabotage. On 26 September, the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines were badly damaged in a deliberate act of sabotage that released huge amounts of methane gas. Almost all the Western media has pointed the finger at Russia but Moscow blames actors hostile to it. There are four plausible suspects: Russia, the US, Poland and Ukraine. Given the actors involved, the issues at stake and the impotence of the UN system caught in the crossfire of great power rivalry, an impartial independent investigation is extremely unlikely. 

This is the Summary Report from a June 2022 international workshop of experts and diplomats which concluded that the assumptions on which nuclear deterrence are based need to be challenged, and the dogma that nuclear deterrence will always be effective should be questioned. Held to coincide with the First Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW, the workshop noted that civil society and like-minded states have so far worked together to make progress on the TPNW and must continue to do so. The workshop which was convened by Toda Peace Institute and the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, gave particular attention to the impact of the war in Ukraine on the perceived value of nuclear deterrence, and the relationship of the TPNW to other treaties and political alliances.

This report synthesises the analysis and discussions as part of a research project launched by the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN) and the Toda Peace Institute in 2021, examining the nuclear and defence dynamics between China, India, and Pakistan. Building on previous APLN papers and the Brookings ‘Strategic Chain’ report, this project seeks to map the contours of the China-India-Pakistan nuclear relationship, identifying the key drivers of conflict, as well as practical nuclear risk reduction, crisis stability, and confidence building measures. The project also aims to explore the possibility of a nuclear restraint regime that includes all three countries. At a workshop organised by the project in February 2022, experts from the Indo-Pacific region, including from China, India, and Pakistan, presented scholarly and policy analyses on the trilateral dynamics in Southern Asia. 

This Policy Brief considers the suggestion that we are arguably on the cusp of a new “nuclear age” where we will need to rethink the rules of the nuclear game and how we prevent nuclear use. We are living in an era of transition and uncertainty in the global nuclear order where nuclear security and nuclear risks are changing and the ways, ends and means devised to manage the nuclear condition are under pressure. This is the result of a technological, geopolitical and normative change and transformation across the nuclear ecosystem. Taken together, these developments are calling into question the way that we manage nuclear threats, and particularly how we think about strategic stability and arms control. While there have been periods of unsettling, rapid, and potentially revolutionary change in the global nuclear order in the past, today appears to be different because the phenomenon is so wide-spread, multifaceted, and because the challenges go right to the heart of how we think about and conceptualise the nuclear condition.