Mapping The Emerging Strategic Stability And Arms Control Landscape

Abstract

• Our nuclear world is changing, and this will have significant impacts on strategic stability and arms control. This is being driven by a mixture of technological, geopolitical and normative forces. • Technological change and innovation are facilitating new types of strategic weaponry and missions. These have the potential to challenge established notions of deterrence and create nuclear risks. • The combination of an emerging system of nuclear great-power multipolarity at the same time as a growth in “nuclear nationalism” and a return of bellicose nuclear rhetoric and statecraft are challenging traditional power balances, arms control and nuclear stability based on restraint. • This is all taking place within a bifurcating global nuclear environment characterised on one side by normative challenges to the established nuclear order and increasing demands for nuclear energy, and on the other with a resurgence in the political salience of nuclear weapons. • Taken together, this suggests 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.

Mapping The Emerging Strategic Stability And Arms Control Landscape