Tong Zhao, APLN board member and Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that China has been watching and learning from Russia’s implicit threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict. Zhao says China’s lessons from the war could lead to further ambiguity and uncertainty in China’s “no first use” nuclear weapons policy in potential conflicts, including one over Taiwan.

This brief is published under the “Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia” (NU-NEA) project, a collaboration between APLN, the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition-Nagasaki University (RECNA), and the Nautilus Institute.

Namrata Goswami, an independent scholar specializing in space policy, reminds us that although the Outer Space Treaty bans placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit, the treaty hasn’t stopped the weaponization of space. She says it’s time for a new international agreement more in tune with contemporary developments and technologies.

Robert Floyd, Izumi Nakamitsu, Kausea Natano, Kenneth Darroux, Simeón Oyono Esono Angue, Mamadou Tangara, and Adaljiza Albertina Xavier Reis Magno call the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty a success story in a world grappling with multiple crises. It’s time to get the CTBT entered into force, they declare in this op-ed published in partnership with the European Leadership Network (ELN).

One development could hold promising implications for containing a potential crisis on the Korean Peninsula: the push by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi to create a nuclear security protection zone around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Joel Petersson-Ivre and Elaine Natalie say it’s worth considering whether North and South Korea can reach a similar agreement in The Korea Times.