ASIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE

APLN member Rakesh Sood argues that a doctrinal shift toward no-first-use and the implementation of technical measures for de-alerting can go a long way in mitigating growing nuclear risks.

Nuclear saber-rattling by Russia has bounded the Ukraine conflict; NATO has refrained from committing troops even as it continues to assist Ukraine, and Russia has refrained from attacking NATO supply lines. But at the same time, the continuation of the conflict has given rise to speculation about if Russia will resort to tactical nuclear weapons to bring about a termination.

China is widely believed to be undertaking a rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal, expected to reach 1,000 warheads by 2030, and 1,500 by 2035, indicating that this would be a precursor to a shift away from it no-first-use to a launch-on-warning policy. This has led to Taiwan increasingly emerging as a flashpoint.

The United States issued a new Nuclear Employment Policy in March to implement a congressional recommendation that the U.S. should have the capability to simultaneously deter both China and Russia and (if deterrence failed) to prevail in a conflict. The focus of modernization was on more accurate and low-yield weapons, but these would blur the firebreak and lead to escalation.

Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia are self-declared nuclear-weapon-free-zones, but the new conflicts and rivalries are undermining the non-proliferation consensus too. With Sweden and Finland joining NATO, almost all of Europe relies on nuclear security – the United Kingdom and France as nuclear powers and the rest the United States’ extended deterrence. In Asia, Japan and South Korea are less reassured and an internal debate on options is underway. In the Middle East, the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action  has led Iran closer to the nuclear threshold. If Iran moves forward, Saudi Arabia (and perhaps Egypt and Turkey) would want enrichment and reprocessing rights, at the least.

With AI and growing cyber and space capabilities, strategic stability has become too complex to be limited to nuclear stability, but this makes its objective clearer – to preserve the nuclear taboo. Nuclear deterrence in the third nuclear age must be redesigned to work in a multipolar, asymmetric nuclear world where there are multiple nuclear dyads but linked into nuclear chains.

Since nuclear weapons cannot be wished away, we need to lengthen the nuclear fuse. A doctrinal shift toward a no-first-use and technical measures toward de-alerting can go a long way in mitigating the growing nuclear risks.

Read the full article here.

Image: iStock