Challenges in the Second Nuclear Century
9 minutes
As my colleagues Larry Rubin and Nick Gvosdev wrote in the introduction to our first issue, “The mission of the relaunched Orbis is to bridge the gap between scholarship and policy by asking strategic questions, interpreting technological change, and examining emerging geopolitical competition.” Since its inception in 1957, they note that the purpose of this journal has been “to help scholars, policy makers, and practitioners understand a world where power, technology, and political order are constantly being reshaped.” To that end, the first issue explored the vast technological changes in the international system under way and the role of the United States within that evolving order. Our second issue focuses on one key topic of international politics: nuclear weapons. The contributions each explore a critical element of the nuclear domain shaping the international system.
Across institutional positions, high-level bureaucratic experience, and professional and educational backgrounds, the authors’ perspectives vary. Their articles affirm that there are major changes afoot in the nuclear landscape that will shape the future of international politics. They do not necessarily agree, however, on the sources of the emerging challenges, and where potential solutions might lie. Nevertheless, their pieces contribute to a debate over just how problematic the coming nuclear landscape might be.
Reinterpreting the Old Architecture for a More Nuclear World
As Brad Roberts notes in this issue, “The international nuclear order was the first major offshoot of the global political order put in place after World War II.” Though no agreed-upon definition of that nuclear order exists, for Roberts it comprises the nuclear-relevant treaties for nonproliferation, arms control, and disarmament, as well as the distribution of nuclear capabilities across the global system. It is here—within the structures, institutions, and collective understandings of the system—that many major changes have taken place: The existing guardrails are crumbling; the core tenets of the old order may no longer hold, and the nuclear arsenals of existing weapons states and aspirations of would-be nuclear possessors are evolving.
The world is losing its Cold War institutional frameworks for managing nuclear politics alongside the means of both communication and risk management that have atrophied. Amy Woolf highlights that the arms control treaties that once kept arms races in check and prevented nuclear accidents have disappeared. Great-power relations are increasingly adversarial, and without institutional frameworks for open communication, information sharing, and risk reduction, may become increasingly dangerous, as Lowell H. Schwartz argues. Roberts emphasizes that the fact that the United States may be ceding its critical leadership role as guarantor of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and key facilitator of most of these institutions suggests that strategic stability—that no side is advantaged by striking first with nuclear weapons—may now be imperiled.
It is not just that the formal institutions supporting this order have unraveled. As Woolf reminds us, of equal if not greater importance is that the nuclear norms that facilitated the lack of nuclear use on the battlefield since World War II are increasingly called into question. During the Cold War, nuclear thinking evolved in the United States and Soviet Union, such that both states recognized that their mutual vulnerability dissuaded nuclear use against each other. Eventually, others also recognized that nuclear weapons were useful for retaliation—not coercion or warfighting. In 1985, the leaders of the United States and Soviet Union declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” In 2022, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council collectively re-affirmed this sentiment. Though just four short years have transpired since then, it seems that now, thinking about nuclear weapons and their utility may be shifting if states believe nuclear coercion and warfighting are useful for achieving their goals. Under such conditions, states may rely even more on their nuclear arsenals to secure their aims, and the value of nuclear weapons as tools of statecraft will increase.
Alongside these institutional and normative changes, a technological revolution is also underway. On the civilian side, the advancement of fission and fusion energy may yield a new era in nuclear energy, with an expanded material and knowledge base to match, as Austin Long elucidates. This development, while useful from a civilian energy perspective, presents new challenges for nonproliferation: novel reactor designs require novel safeguards and new expertise; equipment and know-how may similarly be increasingly available for nefarious actors. On the military side, Paul Bracken describes an AI-enabled nuclear order—where large scale data processing allows for myriad developments including counterforce targeting of mobile targets—as a key driver of the coming era. Augmented counterforce targeting is important for undermining the perceived security of mobile targets thought to be critical for a state’s security, including everything from mobile missiles, to submarines, to state leadership. To repel the possibility of suffering a debilitating or decapitating conventional counterforce attack, something made more feasible in an AI-enabled world, states with smaller nuclear arsenals may seek deterrence via vertical proliferation—growing the size of their nuclear arsenals to compensate for conventional vulnerability.
Combining a perceived shift in the coercive value of nuclear weapons with their potential ability to deter conventional attack and the absence of the architecture that facilitated non-proliferation, arms control, and disarmament, the result is that we may soon find ourselves in a more nuclear world. We can imagine a future world with a greater number of states possessing nuclear weapons, states with larger nuclear arsenals than they previously thought necessary, and a race for novel and potentially destabilizing technologies to try to counteract the additional nuclear weapons and the advanced capabilities that might be making them necessary in the first place. The politics and the conflict of this new world may be even more nuclear than the first nuclear age.
A Path Ahead?
If the worst permutations of the above possibilities are borne out, then the scenario we will find ourselves in will be volatile. It will be a very nuclear, unstable, and dangerous political world. But opportunities to prevent the worst from happening exist even in such a potentially bleak landscape. As the authors in this issue highlight, there are multiple potential avenues worth exploring.
To start, when credibility is harder to come by in an increasingly nuclear, but arms control-free world, Amy Nelson advocates prioritizing better intelligence signaling to secure and sustain US credibility. She prompts us to remember that adversary deterrence and allied assurance don’t just happen spontaneously. Instead, they are like muscle memory that must be used diligently and deliberately to maintain. Consequently, Nelson argues the United States must strategically deploy nuclear intelligence disclosure to signal credibility. Absent substantiation, she warns that accusations of adversary testing or proliferation violations are hollow, assurance falls on deaf ears to allies who do not believe the United States will come to their defense, and American words are not credible. Only when claims of cheating or promises of assistance are accompanied by timely and substantive intelligence disclosures can the United States signal resolve and credibility, which will only increase in importance in a more nuclear world.
More broadly, the international community and the United States itself could make choices now that might stave off the most competitive possible futures. As Woolf suggests, the great powers could reimagine or resurrect the view that mutual vulnerability may be stabilizing and work to avoid dangerous and costly arms racing spirals. Doing so might mean consciously avoiding AI-enabled counterforce capabilities targeting the adversary’s most vulnerable assets, among other choices. In other words, states might be thoughtful about not building novel, sophisticated technologies despite their potential first mover advantages. They might even consider new arms control or risk mitigation frameworks to inject needed stability back into the system. Regardless of the specifics, nuclear-armed states could work together to rebuild nuclear norms for the new world, either resuscitating old ones or creating new ones more appropriate to the new context. Of course, getting to this admittedly rosier future requires willing partners. And to that end, Schwartz encourages deep thinking now about the procurement and political decisions we are taking and what they will mean for the nuclear relationships we hope for moving forward. The choices we make today will make those relationships more or less adversarial; it is worth thinking through the implications of our choices while we still can.
Thankfully, there are tools available to help navigate the looming decisions. Despite the challenges AI-enabled technology presents, like many innovations, it also comes with opportunities. Looking at the difficulty of parsing Russian nuclear behavior specifically, Adam Stulberg reminds us that large language models and large-scale data processing can be useful for navigating adversarial behavior and understanding that behavior it its own context. He notes how Russia’s conduct in Ukraine could suggest both traditional modes of Russian deterrence but also more risk-acceptant and brinksmanship-like behavior. Given the risks of failing to understand Russian red lines and models of escalation, AI-enabled models can help scholars and analysts not only understand Moscow’s coercive threats without imposing a Western-worldview on them but determine the appropriate allied response. Additionally, Long describes what we can learn from the first nuclear century to help navigate the coming second. He points to recently declassified Cold War documents that might help answer previous unknowns that may be consequential moving forward: Why, for example, did the severity and nature of the bipolar competition vary from one technological domain to another? The Soviets had far less success in space relative to the United States than their 1957 Sputnik launch might have portended. By contrast, they successfully closed the strategic forces gap with the United States in less than a decade. It is possible that the answers to such questions are out there if only we choose to look. Long also recalls that the decisions the United States and Soviet Union made during the Cold War—about proliferation, arms control, and alliance dynamics—helped manage what might have been a less stable and more dangerous system. The importance of leadership on these critical issues then and now should not be forgotten.
Much More to Learn
As the pages of this special issue make clear, there are many unanswered questions about the nuclear environment that is evolving, the technology driving those changes, and how best to navigate the coming world. In the months and years ahead, we hope you’ll look to the pages of Orbis as we continue to prioritize analysis and commentary on these critical topics. It is too soon to know if we are heading toward the nuclear precipice or if with time, effort, and clear-headedness, stability may once again prevail.
