After a long absence, nuclear great power politics is back. Russian nuclear threats dominate global headlines, military analysts attempt to estimate the likelihood of a new Taiwan Strait crisis escalating into a nuclear exchange between the United States and China, and India is gradually emerging as a nuclear-armed great power from outside the existing nuclear order. The Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is the second in just over four years to elevate great power threats over regional proliferators and terrorist groups.Footnote 1 This seems a long way away from the concerns about nuclear-armed ‘rogue’ states and nuclear terrorism that dominated the international security debate during the war on terror (WoT) years.
By nuclear great power politics, we mean the role of nuclear weapons as an important, sometimes even primary, driver of great power policies towards each other. The decline in prominence of the WoT framing discussed in various contributions to this special issue has facilitated a new dominant Western public discourse: the return of ‘great power politics’ or ‘great power competition’ in general.Footnote 2 Most recently, this has included a return to concerns about nuclear use in interstate conflict.Footnote 3 But underappreciated thus far is not just the way that great power competition is creating nuclear dangers, but instead the ways in which nuclear concerns are already shaping great power relations and the global order.
While nuclear weapons had been central to the strategic and diplomatic relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, in the unipolar era that followed, fears of arms racing and nuclear crises, and the urgency of great power arms control, disappeared from public discourse for the better part of 30 years. Even nuclear specialists turned their attentions to other issues for much of the ‘unipolar moment’. Instead, scholars, commentators, and policymakers turned to other risks short of nuclear escalation in great power wars in what became characterised in the Western debate as a ‘Second Nuclear Age’. The post ‘9/11’ framing, in particular, greatly elevated a new set of nuclear concerns, especially for Western audiences. This included the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to weaker states, the security of nuclear materials around the word, and the potential of nuclear terrorism. Nuclear weapons did not disappear from international politics during this period. They still fuelled crises and controversies and therefore remained prominent in public debates over international issues. But these were principally crises of proliferation (e.g. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya), regional flashpoints (India–Pakistan), and developments in nuclear security (e.g. the discovery of the A. Q. Khan black-market network). When compared with Cold War-era crises, the stakes appeared low, and apocalyptic predictions, when rarely made, were quickly dismissed.Footnote 4
Today, this has changed. Nuclear weapons are firmly back on the table as a central currency of international politics and statecraft, and for the first time ever, we can see the emergence of a genuinely multipolar nuclear order. This is likely to have a number of effects that need to be understood and perhaps combated, from greater risks of escalation or miscalculation to the impact on the structures of global governance. Importantly, the return of nuclear great power politics coincides with (and is helping to accelerate) the transition to a more complex nuclear era in which rapid technological change and an increasingly fractured global nuclear governance architecture are challenging established thinking and practices of nuclear politics.Footnote 5 Scholars are already beginning to characterise this as a shift into a ‘new’ or ‘Third’ nuclear age, where the nuclear threat hierarchy has shifted.Footnote 6
After having taken a back seat to other global security concerns for so long, policymakers and analysts are ill equipped to identify the nuclear dimensions of what otherwise seems like great power competition over other issues (status, resources, ideology, etc.). We do not argue that nuclear concerns lie behind every foreign policy decision made in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, or New Delhi. But the search for security in a new nuclear age plays a much more important role in the ways in which these powers approach each other than is widely appreciated.
This is not to say that the dominant WoT framing leaves nothing behind. Technologically, the WoT leaves behind established military programmes such as precision strike weapons and missile defence systems that were designed to counter what were labelled ‘rogue’ actors but which are now causing major problems in great power relations. Strategically, the WoT leaves behind the legacies of the doctrine of pre-emption (labelled, at the time, the ‘Bush Doctrine’) and the experience of Western-led regime change in Iraq and Libya. North Korea remains nuclear-armed, and Iran remains a serious proliferation concern. Both have drawn lessons from the fates of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, which continue to shape their roles in the global nuclear order today. Diplomatically, the WoT framing helped to rejuvenate the nuclear disarmament agenda, at least inasmuch as it spurred high-profile Cold War warriors to publicly call for nuclear disarmament due to fears over nuclear terrorism.Footnote 7 This, alongside the successful campaign of civil society organisations and key non-nuclear states to create the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, arguably set in train the division between deterrers and disarmers that dominates nuclear debates today. All of these lingering effects continue to shape the new nuclear era even as the framing of great power politics now takes centre stage.
We proceed in six sections: the first and second explain how the role of nuclear weapons in shaping great power nuclear relations virtually disappeared from the public and policy debate after the Cold War and how it was supplanted by the fear of WMD terrorism during the WoT years; the third, fourth, and fifth sections detail how the return of great power nuclear politics is creating disruptive dynamics and dangerous flashpoints in different ways in different parts of the world; the sixth connects the return of nuclear great power politics today to four lessons from two previous eras and puts this in context with the ongoing shift from a Western-led nuclear order to a more diverse and contested Third Nuclear Age; the conclusion reflects on what has and hasn’t changed from the WoT years and what this means for nuclear scholarship.
The disappearance and return of nuclear great power politics
The politics of the great powers simply refers to the relations between those states perceived as holding the particular social status of ‘great power’ that has become a central part – even a social institution – of the modern era of global politics.Footnote 8 This club-like select group of states relate to each other in specific and recognisable ways, not least in their strategic relations. While the concept of ‘great power competition’ has recently become popular as a catch-all phrase to capture this, in reality competition is only one form of great power interaction. Great power politics can range from competition to conflict to cooperation and even collusion.Footnote 9 Such relations can be driven by different interests including security, economic, ideological, and even status-based concerns. In this article we are interested in one particular form of security concerns – that which relates to nuclear capabilities.
All forms of nuclear weapons-related issues can drive and shape great power politics (hence our decision to adopt the terminology of nuclear great power politics rather than ‘nuclear great power competition’). Such relations can be cooperative (as in the case of the negotiation of arms control agreements or confidence-building measures), competitive (as in arms racing) or, in the worst-case scenario, even conflictual (as in nuclear crises such as the Cuban Missile Crisis). The defining characteristic then of nuclear great power politics is that some concern about nuclear weapons is shaping the way in which the great powers relate to each other. As we will discuss in some of the examples below, this can manifest in obvious ways such as in the recent nuclear threats made by Russia in order to dissuade any direct NATO military action in response to its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But such nuclear great power politics can also manifest in less obvious ways such as the role of nuclear-armed submarines in driving US-Sino competition in the South China Sea, or the role of responsible nuclear stewardship in India’s rise to great power status. In each of these forms, concerns over the ultimate risk of nuclear war between the great powers is playing a causal role in shaping the nature of, and even outcomes in, the relations between the great powers.
We used to worry a lot about great power nuclear politics and the risk of nuclear war. During the roughly 45-year-long US–Soviet Cold War, the focus of scholars and policymakers was on the danger of nuclear use between the superpowers and the possibility of ameliorating this through mutual vulnerability, arms control, or confidence-building measures. In the 1980s, public engagement with nuclear issues was considerable, and mass protests were held across the world with crowds in the hundreds of thousands marching against the bomb and the arms race. These fears and anxieties were also reflected in popular culture of the time, notably in apocalyptic films such as The Day After, Threads, When the Wind Blows, and War Games.
But for the past 30 years, the risks posed by nuclear weapons, and particularly the risks of nuclear war between the great powers, have receded considerably, with focus shifting to other nuclear hazards such as unsecured fissile material and nuclear terrorism, and more generally in favour of other existential threats to societies and their inhabitants. Soon after the end of the Cold War, and particularly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it became commonplace for scholars to make sweeping claims such as that ‘deterrence theory is stuck in the logic of its Cold War bipolar origins and needs to be recast to accommodate an entirely new set of factors’.Footnote 10
In the years that followed, at least in the United States and allied countries, theories and practices of deterrence became ‘nuanced’ and ‘complex’ as the spectre of great power confrontation turned from being a policy concern to something of historical interest.Footnote 11 Perhaps the best illustration of this was the arguments put forward in the United States for unilaterally withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the decision to deploy national missile defences in the early 2000s. While the concept of arms control survived, albeit much beleaguered, it took a back seat compared to the wider idea of nuclear security. As the opening line of a report co-authored by possibly the most eminent collection of figures in this area put it in 2005: ‘The gravest threat facing Americans today is a terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb in one of our cities.’Footnote 12
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the two main protagonists – the United States and Russia – undertook a process of significant reductions of their respective nuclear arsenals. This process of disarmament, which included formal treaties, and the fact that nuclear weapons were not being replaced by anything else at the strategic level, seemed to signal the end of nuclear great power politics. Concurrently, the extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995 ushered in a period where the focus would be on non-proliferation and measures to counteract the spread of nuclear weapons rather than on great power nuclear dynamics such as arms control, crises, and war. While the Second Nuclear Age thesisFootnote 13 didn’t argue that the nuclear relationship between the United States and Russia had disappeared entirely, it did place far less emphasis on the ‘central balance’ and the ‘major powers’ as a part of global nuclear politics.
Instead of the prospect of nuclear use in a crisis involving the great powers, fears of ‘loose Russian nukes’ rose to prominence during the 1990s, ‘nuclear terrorism’ came to dominate the US and global security debate after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the centrality of non- and counter-proliferation remained throughout. These were seen as components of a global nuclear order where the locus of attention was drawn to the regions and the threat of aspiring state and non-state nuclear actors.
While Colin Gray warned that ‘great power conflict, is very much alive and well’Footnote 14 in the mid-2000s, policymakers and academics alike seemed increasingly uninterested in and even apathetic about nuclear issues beyond proliferation. Washington Post columnist George Will even described the 1990s as a ‘holiday from history’.Footnote 15 Nuclear risks increasingly fell down the agenda for most people when asked about the major challenges facing society.Footnote 16 The visible effects of prolonged inaction on climate change and more recently global health emergencies helped to make fears of a nuclear-armed great power confrontation seem almost antiquated.
Some scholars, such as Martin van Creveld, even went so far as to downplay even nuclear proliferation to so-called rogue states in the face of what they saw as the more important challenge of global terrorism (including nuclear terrorism). As van Creveld put it in 2006, terrorism ‘represents a far greater threat than do any number of third-rate dictators – including, let it be added, those who have acquired, or are about to acquire, nuclear weapons’.Footnote 17 Even those that were more focused on the drivers rather than the symptoms of terrorism were keen to emphasise how much had changed since the anxiety-inducing great power competition of the Cold War:
During the Cold War, we believed that a third world war, a nuclear holocaust, was the worst possible threat to human security. While the use of nuclear weapons is an ever present possibility, our more immediate concern is a much more complicated mix of political violence, crime, material deprivation, and environmental degradation.Footnote 18
All of this facilitated the disappearance of the concept of nuclear great power politics. But under the veneer of a Second Nuclear Age, the dynamics that drove Cold War nuclear great power politics sat dormant, not dead. Perceptions of relative US decline – whether accurate or otherwise – have elevated Russia and China (and to a slightly lesser extent, India) to ‘pole’ status in a multipolar order. Nuclear weapons may have seemed less relevant to contemporary geopolitics from Washington. But decision-makers in Beijing, Moscow, and New Delhi did not share this view. Today, the United States, Russia, China, and India have all produced national security strategies that discuss great power competition and in some cases very clearly link the role of nuclear weapons with geopolitical objectives.Footnote 19
The reimagining of nuclear threats in the war on terror
While some argued that in what they called the Second Nuclear Age ‘regional nuclear powers will define the proliferation and conflict landscape’, for others – particularly those who understood that from 2001 onwards that the WoT was the framework that had almost entirely captured imaginations in Western capitals – this new era would also be one in which attention turned specifically to the spectre of nuclear-armed non-state actors.Footnote 20 The 2002 US National Security Strategy had made clear the scale of the efforts to not just disrupt but ‘defeat’ seemingly any and all non-state groups perceived to be terrorist organisations: ‘The struggle against global terrorism is different from any other war in our history. It will be fought on many fronts against a particularly elusive enemy over an extended period of time.’Footnote 21 Importantly, the National Security Strategy specifically identified the link between WMD (the preferred way to frame nuclear weapons at the time by linking them to chemical and biological weapons under this moniker) and terrorism: ‘Our immediate focus will be those terrorist organizations of global reach and any terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism which attempts to gain or use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or their precursors.’Footnote 22
The incentive to link nuclear threats to the post-9/11 framework of the WoT was strong, given the way that, at least in Western capitals, funding, energy, and political attention was quickly channelled into the overarching framework of what was framed as a generational struggle against terrorism. Some, drawing on earlier predictions from the 1990s, even characterised this as a Fourth World War.Footnote 23 As Paul Bracken, the leading chronicler of the shift in US policy circles of thinking in terms of a Second Nuclear Age put it in 2012 in relation to the work of US think-tanks on security issues: ‘Think tanks have to fish where the fish are; they have to go where the money is. They have nearly all moved to Washington and they study terrorism, Afghanistan, and nation building.’Footnote 24
During the first decade of the 21st century, it was not unusual for mainstream media outlets to carry articles with confident statements such as ‘as nuclear technology spreads, terrorists will enjoy increasing odds of getting their hands on nuclear weapons’.Footnote 25 The idea that acts of terrorism, like those seen on 9/11, could have been much worse had non-state actors had access to nuclear weapons and other WMD had been a recurring theme of much commentary that appeared almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, particularly among those associated with what would become known as Neoconservatism.Footnote 26 International Relations scholars outside of the established networks of terrorism studies scholarship were not immune from the temptation to link terrorism with the prospects of the use of WMD regardless of any evidence of the likelihood of this. Writing in the months after the 9/11 attacks, Robert Keohane argued that ‘the frightening prospects of terrorists using means of mass destruction makes attempts to prevent terrorism even more urgent and toleration of lower-level terrorism even more problematic’.Footnote 27 Such concerns were amplified by the notion that the old theories of nuclear deterrence – developed through the great power politics dominated era of the US–Soviet Cold War – were no longer applicable to potentially ‘undeterrable’ actors.Footnote 28
Importantly, given the destructive capability of even the smallest-Dyield weapon in today’s nuclear arsenals, such concerns did not need to be underpinned by incontrovertible evidence of non-state terrorist groups being close to acquiring a nuclear device to drive policy. George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, famously argued that ‘if there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’sabout our response.’Footnote 29The palatable sense of insecurity, particularly but not solely, in the United States in the years that followed the 9/11 attacks, meant that it was not at all uncommon to see nuclear policy analysts speaking of the need for urgent action to ‘win the race to prevent a nuclear 9/11’.Footnote 30 Most controversially, the George W. Bush administration used the threat of the Ba’athist government led by Saddam Hussein in Iraq passing a WMD to a non-state terrorist group as one of its justifications for the invasion in 2003. President Bush himself repeatedly linked the administration’s claims about an Iraq WMD programme (including a reconstituted nuclear weapons programme) and terrorism, saying Saddam ‘possesses weapons of terror. He provides funding and training and safe haven to terrorists who would willingly deliver weapons of mass destruction against America and other peace-loving countries.’Footnote 31 The sense of urgency in Bush’s pre-invasion rhetoric was clear: ‘The attacks of September the 11th, 2001 showed what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terror states could do with weapons of mass destruction.’ Much like in the 1980s, these shifted (largely Western) nuclear concerns found expression in different types of popular Hollywood films such as The Sum of All Fears, Broken Arrow, The World Is Not Enough, and The Peacemaker as well as American television shows such as 24, Castle, and Numb3rs.
Such societal angst was reflected in government priorities well beyond the Bush administration, the immediate post-9/11 period, and the Neoconservative movement. President Obama told the journalist Bob Woodward that ‘a potential game changer would be a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists, blowing up a major American city … when I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top’.Footnote 32 Yet over time, as intelligence, policing, and nuclear security policies (particularly the physical securing of nuclear materials) effectively reduced the chances of non-state actors of any kind having access to assembled weapons or the materials needed to assemble even a crude nuclear device, the high prioritisation given to nuclear terrorism within nuclear policy discussions receded.
Scholarship pointed to the low likelihood of a nuclear-armed state passing on a weapon to a non-state actor.Footnote 33 By late in the second decade following the 9/11 attacks, even those advocating for a continued focus on the threat of nuclear terrorism were striking a much more measured tone. Mathew Bunn and Nickolas Roth pointed out that despite the obviously high impact of an attack, the likelihood of a terrorist group detonating a nuclear device ‘may well be quite low. There is no need for panic, which is exactly what terrorists have sought to achieve by repeatedly claiming to have nuclear weapons. But there is a need for prudent, focused action.’Footnote 34
Calls for prudence rather than panic in a given policy area tend not to galvanise attention and resources but do allow space for analysts to look a little further down the track in their threat assessments than the immediate policy and media debates of the day. While the focus on nuclear terrorism waned the further away we got from the 9/11 attacks (as did the almost all-consuming focus on terrorism in mainstream security studies more broadly), concerns about proliferation and the intentions of the newest nuclear-armed state, North Korea, continued to dominate at least Western nuclear scholarship and policy analysis. The prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme remained high on the agenda. This was only encouraged by revelations about Iranian non-compliance with the NPT and International Atomic Energy Agency before 2003,Footnote 35 allegations by Israel of further non-compliance after this time,Footnote 36 as well as the eventual negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action aimed at limiting Iran’s ability to build a bomb (later scuppered by the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the deal in 2018). Non-proliferation efforts also remained focused on North Korea until 2006, when it tested its first nuclear device, turning the issue of non-proliferation into one of deterrence. This was underpinned by what one account characterises as a ‘conservative ideology of post–cold war nuclear politics, one that privileges a stable international order dominated by status-quo large nuclear powers’.Footnote 37
By the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the pendulum had well and truly swung back towards more traditional security concerns over interstate rivalry and conflict. The rise of what Ali Wyne has described as a ‘unifying construct’ to orient US foreign policy, in particular in the form of ‘great power competition’, has replaced the previous construct of a WoT.Footnote 38 Nuclear weapons policies, particularly concerns about aspects of contemporary US nuclear and strategic non-nuclear modernisation on the part of Washington’s putative great power ‘competitors’, is driving important aspects of this new era. We now turn to examining some of the underlying nuclear drivers of contemporary great power politics in the Euro-Atlantic, Asia-Pacific, and South Asia.
Nuclear threats and coercion in the Euro-Atlantic
Even before Vladimir Putin warned that Russian nuclear forces were being ‘placed on alert’ in March 2022 as part of the ongoing war in Ukraine, nuclear weapons, rhetoric, and posturing had slowly begun to re-emerge as a focal point of Euro-Atlantic security. For at least the last decade, and certainly since the short-lived United States–Russia ‘reset’ of 2010, older concerns over nuclear parity and deterrence credibility have returned to US and especially Russian great power politics. Driven by the Second Nuclear Age thinking of the WoT years that downplayed the importance of great power deterrence by punishment (at least in US policy discourse) in favour of a deterrence by denial strategy focused on small states and non-state actors, a series of decisions and military deployments by Washington were viewed, rightly or wrongly, as undermining Russian security by Moscow. The most important of these were the US unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001 and subsequent deployment of a national ballistic missile defence system from 2006, and the initiation of a conventional ‘Prompt Global Strike’ missile programme from 2004. Over the longer term, this has materialised in plans for the modernisation and recapitalisation of strategic weapons capabilities; in the medium term, it has involved the weakening and in many cases abolition of arms control agreements designed to harbour a level of strategic stability – and in the shorter term, a return to overt ‘tactical’ nuclear threats in a way not seen for a generation.
At the heart of the return of great power nuclear politics in the Euro-Atlantic are two different views of the post–Cold War settlement. The current Euro-Atlantic security order is one that has been fundamentally shaped by the United States and its allies and is underpinned by the US extended deterrence guarantee through NATO. On the other side of the equation is Russia, seeking to rebalance the perceived injustice of being relegated to non-great power status despite maintaining the world’s largest nuclear stockpile during the WoT years. The nuclear angle is significant here in two respects: first, because NATO security relies on the credibility of the US deterrence guarantee, and, second, because Russia has attempted to use its nuclear capability to protect against outside intervention while it harasses and attacks its immediate neighbours. But nuclear weapons are crucial to the Russian elite in its desire to reacquire great power status and signal this (domestically and internationally), not just as a way of trying to prevent stronger Western action in response to its military activities.
Central to the role of nuclear weapons in shaping contemporary United States–Russia relations has been the gradual return of the action–reaction dynamic associated with arms racing. This time, though, it is not the straightforward nuclear arms race of the past, but a more complex situation involving nuclear and strategic non-nuclear weapons. From US missile defence capabilities to Russian hypersonic missiles, to efforts by both in counter-space, ‘cyber’, and anti-submarine warfare domains, this new arms race is more technologically and strategically complex than the United States–Soviet arms race of the Cold War. This appears to reflect a game of strategic cat-and-mouse, whereby the development and deployment of high-tech non-nuclear weaponry by the United States (perhaps designed to escape ‘stalemate’)Footnote 39 have driven Russian interest in new, bigger, and in some cases more exotic nuclear delivery systems as well as a suite of strategic non-nuclear capabilities. The classic example of this is how the US pursuit of strategic missile defences has ostensibly resulted in reciprocal moves by Russia to build strategic offensive nuclear systems that can circumvent/defeat these defences (e.g. the Sarmat heavy ICBM, Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, and the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile).Footnote 40 There is a clear military logic to this emerging arms race. Yet nuclear weapons are also being used as a tool to demonstrate power, prestige, and importance, especially by Russia, as much as for specific deterrence purposes. Nuclear weapons and strategic power are central to Russian identity, domestic politics, and particularly the popularity of the leadership, in a way far removed from the 1990s and the early 2000s.Footnote 41
The relative ineffectiveness of Russia’s ‘modern’ conventional forces, particularly its army, in its invasion of, and subsequent war against, Ukraine from February 2022 only adds to this picture of the growing importance of nuclear forces to Russia’s claim to great power status. Almost from the very start of hostilities, Russian president Vladimir Putin was quick to elevate the nuclear component of the war, warning openly about Russian nuclear use should the West directly intervene in the conflict. While some of this may be part of nuclear signalling (in effect attempting to bolster deterrence),Footnote 42 there is a real fear that, as Russian troops become bogged down, political problems mount at home for President Putin, or Ukrainian troops recapture territory previously lost to Russia, unthinkable options may become possible.Footnote 43 This is likely exacerbated by the enormous amount of military equipment that has been used or destroyed, which will almost certainly make nuclear weapons more important for Russian security in the years ahead.
Moves aimed at incorporating the occupied regions of Ukraine into Russia (whether through referenda or outright annexation as in Crimea in 2014) are also worrying given that this would make attacks in these areas tantamount to attacks on Russian territory. President Putin has made it clear that attacks on Russian territory would be met by ‘all means at our disposal’. In response, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned of ‘horrific consequences’ should Russia use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.Footnote 44
In addition to the very obvious role of nuclear threats for signalling, coercion, and deterrence in Russian strategy during the Ukraine invasion – effectively using nuclear threats to facilitate conventional aggression – Russian actions have revitalised the nuclear component of US, Western, and NATO strategy too. The nuclear component of NATO almost fell away during the WoT years, with strong calls to remove the US B61 nuclear bombs or retire the Dual Capable Aircraft based in Europe. While the Ukraine war has posed some difficult questions for the US and NATO about the credibility of deterrence, the US (and UK) nuclear guarantee to Euro-Atlantic security has been rejuvenated.Footnote 45 The Ukraine war also appears to have resolved an enduring question about the future of ‘nuclear sharing’ in Europe (US nuclear weapons that could be operated by NATO allies in times of war). It has even driven debate in the United States about different types of nuclear capabilities for deterrence and reinforced the central role of US nuclear weapons for extended nuclear deterrence at a time when the general consensus is that the far bigger challenge facing US policymakers is in Asia.
The 2022 Ukraine war is a symptom not a cause of the return to great power politics, but it powerfully highlights the importance of nuclear weapons to Moscow’s position in – and perhaps the Kremlin elites’ vision of – the Euro-Atlantic security complex. The security architecture built towards the end of the Cold War, and sustained in the years after, has slowly disintegrated. With the 2010 New START Treaty – in which Russia suspended participation in early 2023 – standing as the final strategic arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, and both sides seemingly locked into a nuclear-strategic non-nuclear arms race, navigating the return of nuclear great power politics in the Euro-Atlantic looks set to be extremely challenging.
Beneath the surface: Nuclear great power competition in the Western Pacific
One of the areas of the world often labelled a ‘flashpoint’ in the return of great power politics today is the South China Sea.Footnote 46 These waters are subject to the multiple, overlapping claims of no fewer than six different actors (China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan). It is also an area critical to commercial shipping for every state in the region and hosts the second busiest port in the world (Singapore). However, it is China’s territorial claim to the vast majority of this maritime area and the islands and smaller features within it – that which falls within its self-declared nine-dash line – has been the major focus of tensions in recent years.
Despite its geographic distance, through political rhetoric, high-profile naval visits (often coupled with political statements),Footnote 47 and ‘freedom-of-navigation operations’, the United States has inserted itself into the disputes to challenge China’s claim. US officials are usually careful to call for ‘all parties’ to resolve their disputes peacefully and avoid militarising the region, but, unsurprisingly, it is Chinese actions that have attracted the ire of Washington.
The parties to this dispute have therefore found themselves on the frontline of the early stages of the return of great power politics. A number of issues have been identified as the ‘real’ reason China has grown increasingly active in the South China Sea.Footnote 48 This ranges from a desire to extract from the region’s undersea oil and gas fields and fish stocks, to the opportunity to demand deference from the relatively weak states of South-east Asia and thereby demonstrate its status as a great power to others, to a deep-seated nationalist drive to cast off the ‘century of humiliation’.Footnote 49 Any of these explanations are plausible but unlikely to account for the reputational risk that Beijing has been willing to take to increase its military presence in the region over the last decade or so, let alone increasing the risk of a military incident that could escalate to war.
There are other ways of demonstrating status and even other ways of bullying small states without investing large sums of money on island reclamation and building runways in remote locations. Oil, gas, and fish can all be imported from elsewhere without being taken to the International Court of Justice, ensuring that your diplomats spend their time debating the finer points of international maritime law with their counterparts in the region, and giving what might be otherwise-shaky US allies and partners every reason to bind themselves to Washington.
Instead, nuclear weapons are at the heart of the South China Sea dispute. While analysts focus on the sea’s littoral states and their overlapping claims to the rocks, reefs, and other features that break the surface, it is the nuclear-armed relations beneath the surface that significantly drive both Chinese and US interest in the area. Like other nuclear-armed great powers, submarine-based nuclear capabilities are extremely important to ensuring the survivability of its second-strike arsenal. The early stages of an increase in its land-based missiles notwithstanding, the relatively small size of China’s existing land-based arsenal, its small and recently dormant bomber fleet, and advances in US counterforce capabilities all make Beijing’s nuclear-armed submarines (SSBNs) extremely important.
China maintains submarine bases on its northern coastline in Liaoning and Shandong provinces. However, submarines leaving these bases must pass through the Yellow and East China Seas, an area surrounded by US allies – formal and informal – in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.Footnote 50 They are therefore especially vulnerable to US anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities, which are supported by shore-based signal processing as well as allied ASW vessels and aircraft.Footnote 51 Given US and allied command of the seas in North-east Asia, getting those SSBNs out to open water where they are harder to track is an extremely difficult task.Footnote 52
Therefore, the newer Longpo submarine base on Hainan Island, an area that juts out into the South China Sea, allows China a second, and far more reliable, path to SSBN survivability in a crisis.Footnote 53 This area offers China the ability to operate a submarine bastion with the ability to strike US bases in Hawaii and Guam. Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda note already that ‘whenever they put to sea in this region, China’s SSBNs typically appear to be accompanied by a protection detail, including surface warships and aircraft (and possibly attack submarines) capable of tracking adversarial submarines’, a point echoed by other scholarsFootnote 54 as well as the Commander of US Strategic Command in testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services in May 2022.Footnote 55
Bastion patrols for its SSBNs do not require China to control the entire South China Sea per se, but it does mean ensuring that the United States and its allies are not able to do this. Beijing’s efforts to establish a serious military footprint on the tiny islands and reefs in the area, and its aggressive response – both military and diplomatic – to US and allied opposition to this, are an investment in China’s future secure second-strike capability. Without the nuclear dimension, the contest over the South China Sea would have much lower stakes than it does today. This, in large part, explains why China has demonstrated very little willingness to de-escalate and compromise in this area, particularly when compared to its recent actions in the East China Sea.
Without an understanding of, and attentiveness to, the role of nuclear weapons in driving the South China Sea dispute, the smaller Southeast Asian parties to the dispute are extremely unlikely to achieve their ends. Nor are they likely to successfully negotiate any concessions if their ideal ends cannot be met. Worse than this, by misunderstanding or ignoring the nuclear stakes, political leaders, advisors, and public figures calling for showdown in the South China Sea risk pushing the United States and China into a serious confrontation.Footnote 56
In contrast to the Euro-Atlantic example discussed above, the nuclear dimension of the South China Sea dispute illustrates the political rather than technological legacy of the Second Nuclear Age thinking associated with the WoT period. While ASW capabilities and strategy far pre-date the WoT era, the thinking behind the US and allied approach is underpinned by an approach to nuclear strategy that still downplays the importance of maintaining stable deterrence relationships between nuclear-armed great powers. Insisting on keeping at risk Chinese SSBNs only makes sense within a strategy that does not accept mutual vulnerability as the cornerstone of stable nuclear deterrence.
The impact of India as an emerging nuclear great power
The third component of the return of nuclear great power politics will be the role and influence of India. India is quite different to the United States, Russia, and China: notwithstanding the geopolitical (and prestige) competition with China, it does not have an immediate great power nuclear rivalry, nor does it have the kind of growing strategic partnership that Russia and China enjoy. India is also not a signatory to the near-universally signed Non-Proliferation Treaty and is therefore left out of the de facto club of P5 ‘nuclear weapon states’ (NWS).Footnote 57 While India has been slowly assimilated into some aspects of the global nuclear order, New Delhi retains a significant link with the Global South, and particularly the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), when it comes to contesting this established nuclear order. As Priya Chacko and Alexander Davis have pointed out, this somewhat Janus-faced position has resulted in India ‘moving India up the global nuclear hierarchy rather than challenging the hierarchy itself’.Footnote 58 This all makes India a significant factor in the return of nuclear great power politics, not least in relation to accommodating aspiring nuclear great powers – particularly ‘outsiders’ – into existing frameworks.
Since conducting an overt nuclear test in 1998, various Indian governments appear to have been driven by a desire to be seen as a ‘responsible nuclear power’,Footnote 59 and for nuclear-armed India to become normalised within the global nuclear order. This makes India quite different to the other ‘proliferators’ (Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, etc.) at the heart of the Second Nuclear Age thesis that dovetailed with the WoT. While India cannot become a recognised Nuclear Weapons State under the NPT, it has slowly moved into a position whereby its nuclear-armed status is to some extent accepted. New Delhi benefits from many of the advantages enjoyed by members of the NPT, such as access to nuclear fuel from international markets, without the same level of ostracisation experienced by Pakistan, North Korea, and, in a different way, Israel. Part of the reason for this is the importance of India to other major players in the system, particularly the United States and Russia. At least part of this is a result of its nuclear capability, or at least the link between its ‘nuclearity’ and status.
India is unique amongst the nuclear great powers in that it retains good relations with both the United States and Russia. Its rivalry with China, while in some ways more directly militarised, does not yet manifest at the strategic level in the same way as in United States–China or United States–Russia relations.Footnote 60 To highlight this point, officials in New Delhi do not appear as concerned about suspicions of a Chinese nuclear build-up when compared with the United States.Footnote 61 Notwithstanding a number of border skirmishes, there are no real concerns about an India–China conventional war. Moreover, despite a disparity of over 2:1 in Beijing’s favour in terms of nuclear warhead numbers, the India–China strategic balance appears to be stable.Footnote 62 Indian policy appears to be one of reaping the benefits – especially military technology transfer – of close relations with the United States and Russia while avoiding formal alliances with either. This relative independence has meant that prime minister Narendra Modi has been able to – allegedly – influence Vladimir Putin regarding the threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Rather than being driven purely by great power competition, the main nuclear threat shaping Indian policy has traditionally come from Pakistan. Indeed, India and Pakistan clashed several times during the WoT years, and the Indian elite remain fearful of the nuclear terrorism threat emanating from Pakistani territory. However, while the Indian nuclear triad plays a central role in deterring Pakistan, nuclear weapons are now only one part of the Indian strategic deterrence posture. Indian defence planners have been quick to try to exploit a qualitative technological advantage over their neighbour by developing a range of different strategic non-nuclear weapons systems.Footnote 63 This puts India at the heart of the questions currently being asked about whether today’s nuclear great power politics will involve the great powers preparing to fight conventional wars under the nuclear shadow and even contemplating conventional pre-emptive strikes against an adversary’s nuclear forces.Footnote 64
India’s status as a nuclear great power cannot be properly understood without an appreciation of its link with the non-Western world, particularly the NAM. The Indian quest to be seen as a ‘responsible’ nuclear power is important in this regard, because it also speaks to a broader concern amongst developing states about access to nuclear technology for civilian applications. India has historically been a key player in the NAM and has been supportive of efforts to ensure greater access to nuclear technology for the developing world. During the Second Nuclear Age, and especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there was a feeling amongst prominent NAM members that accessing nuclear technology – as enshrined in Article IV of the NPT – became subordinate to (Western) concerns about non-proliferation and nuclear security.Footnote 65
Nuclear great power politics are therefore significant for India in two respects: first, while New Delhi has not – so far – engaged in the arms racing and proliferation of the United States and Russia, nuclear weapons are important to prestige and may even shape a certain idea of (Hindu) ‘nuclear nationalism’.Footnote 66 At the same time, the ability for India to ‘normalise’ itself as a responsible nuclear actor, and a supporter of technology transfer for civilian applications and development, provides a strong link with the Global South, which makes up the vast majority of the non-nuclear weapons states. In the new era of geopolitical competition, it seems that India has moved beyond the ‘nuclear apartheid’Footnote 67 discussed a generation ago to become a main player in the global nuclear order.
History’s lessons for surviving nuclear multipolarity
Given the decline of the master narrative of the WoT in Western framing of global security challenges, but the continuing legacies of some of the policies and ideas that were produced by this era discussed above, the global nuclear order is currently characterised by a dangerous fusion of old and new nuclear norms and practices. If nuclear weapons are already playing a more important role in shaping the return of great power politics than is often appreciated, then it is time to explore the lessons from history that might help us navigate this new chapter of the nuclear age. Because of the nature of this return to nuclear great power politics, this will require a two-pronged approach.
On the one hand, we can return to the last, and only, time nuclear politics were a key driver of great power relations. The US–Soviet Cold War ended without the mushroom clouds that most feared would eventuate. The era of the ‘delicate balance of terror’ should therefore, be our first port of call for thinking through the kinds of policies that might help us navigate the return of nuclear great power politics today.Footnote 68
Yet, on the other hand, this time the distribution of power in general appears more likely to be multipolar than bipolar. This will limit the applicability of some of the Cold War-era lessons. As the 2022 US Nuclear Posture Review puts it: ‘By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries. This will create new stresses on stability and new challenges for deterrence, assurance, arms control, and risk reduction.’Footnote 69 Therefore, the second line of historical inquiry will need to reach further back in order to examine the nature of managing a multipolar balance of power. In particular, the Concert of Europe era of the 19th century provides examples of both success and failure in the management of a multipolar great power balance.
Both lines of historical inquiry and debating the theoretical and policy implications of applying them in combination to today’s challenges will require serious efforts. We can only point towards some early avenues here.
Lessons from the balance of terror
The first lesson is that regardless of the incentives towards competition and even conflict, the great powers themselves can recognise the extraordinary dangers posed by nuclear weapons and adjust their relations accordingly. This does not come naturally to all those who lead nuclear-armed great powers, nor to those advisors who have their ear. It requires some degree of development of what scholars refer to as ‘security dilemma sensibility’ on the part of individual decision-makers. One account defines this sensibility as ‘the ability to understand the role that fear might play in their attitudes and behaviour, including, crucially, the role that one’s own actions may play in provoking that fear’.Footnote 70 The latest research in this area points to the importance of specific process and practices (such as certain forms of face-to-face diplomacy) in cultivating this sensibility.Footnote 71
The second is that the greater the level and intensity of competition between the great powers, the more likely it is that non-great powers will seek nuclear weapons themselves. In other words, by managing or mismanaging their own relations, great powers can either incentivise or disincentivise proliferation. It is no coincidence that the NPT was negotiated and signed in 1968 during the period of superpower détente. Both the United States and Soviet Union were able to agree between themselves that nuclear proliferation was in neither of their interests, but also a critical mass of non-great powers saw enough evidence of ‘great power responsibility’ to sign up to a regime of nuclear abstinence.
Lessons from the balance of power
The third lesson from history is that under conditions of multipolarity, alliance politics is far more complex. For much of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, the presence of multiple centres of power led to a much greater degree of alliance fluidity as states shifted their alliances in order to maintain a rough balance of power when any one power grew too strong. In addition, with multipolarity comes the possible return of alliances between the poles of power themselves rather than only between them and non-great powers.Footnote 72 This can include less institutionalised alliances as well as a wider variety of alliance arrangements (such as non-aggression pacts). This will complicate existing ideas about managing simple nuclear dyads (United States–Russia, United States–China, etc.).Footnote 73 Managing questions of nuclear deterrence and assurance in a multipolar nuclear order is likely to require questioning some of the fundamental assumptions about alliances that today’s policies are based on, given the relatively static and formal nature of alliances in recent decades.
Alliances involving non-great powers will also remain important to analysts and decision-makers alike in that they hold the potential for sparking conflicts between the major powers, or what is referred to as ‘aggregation’.Footnote 74 The causal reasoning is straightforward, as Nuno Monteiro puts it: ‘A dispute involving a great power and a lesser state tends to invoke a response by the latter’s great power sponsor, thereby becoming a confrontation between two great powers.’Footnote 75 This means that the great powers will need to negotiate two separate sets of alliance relationships – those between the major powers and those that include others as well. The complexity of the interaction between these two sets of alliances may well become a hallmark of 21st-century statecraft.
The final lesson is that even with relatively thin political ties between them, it is possible for the great powers to act in concert to preserve the primary foundations of the international system.Footnote 76 Given the obvious threat to the very nature of the international system itself posed by major war between nuclear-armed great powers, some degree of direct collaboration, perhaps even collusion, is likely to be necessary for surviving the return of nuclear great power politics. The historical precedent of instances of prolonged great power cooperation such as the Concert of Europe ought to provide grounds for optimism. While the great powers’ motivation need not extend much beyond the desire to preserve the current international system and their privileged place within it, similarly to the cultivation of ‘security dilemma sensibility’ described above, it does require the cultivation and acceptance of the notion of ‘great power responsibility’.Footnote 77 Even amid competitive policies towards each other, and even in the shadow of direct conflict, the acceptance of a basic level of special responsibilities on the part of great powers is possible in a multipolar order.Footnote 78 The task today is to find ways of building on past notions and practices of great power responsibility for a nuclear-armed world.Footnote 79
Conclusion: Switching frames from the war on terror to great power competition
Over the past decade, we have witnessed a gradual transition from a global environment dominated by the (Western) narrative of the WoT, and not least the threat of ‘rogue’ or non-state actors gaining access to nuclear materials, to a world that has ‘returned’ to focus on competition between the great powers. This shift mirrors a rearrangement in the global balance of power from a world of US unipolarity and primacy to one of multipolarity and a diffusion of influence away from the United States and the West to other parts of the world. If the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were the key moment to understand the previous era, perhaps the full Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent nuclear posturing and geopolitical realignment will be the defining moment of the current one. It could be argued that this shift maps closely onto a transition from a Second Nuclear Age to a Third Nuclear Age in the canon of nuclear scholarship.
As with other historical transitions, there is no abrupt moment when Western elites stopped worrying about relatively weak revisionist states and terrorists acquiring the bomb, but rather a gradual shift in focus towards other challenges over time. Indeed, the WoT-era prospect of new nuclear armed actors hasn’t disappeared – although it is arguably less pronounced than two decades ago. Instead, it has fallen down a rung on the threat hierarchy in Western policy circles (at the same time as Western policy elites in general are playing a less dominant role in global discourse as the voices of non-Western powers rise in relative power and influence). The challenge posed by North Korea hasn’t gone away, the trajectory of the Iranian nuclear programme remains an important question for the international community, and states in other parts of the world remain concerned about nuclear smuggling,Footnote 80 but there doesn’t seem to be the same level of panic about ‘undeterrable’ actors that undergirded the WoT.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear threats were important to the WoT era, and the US response to the attacks of 9/11 was undoubtedly driven by concerns that the next attack might involve a nuclear explosion. Then Vice President Dick Cheney’s ‘one-percent doctrine’ echoed if not underpinned the thinking that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under the pretext/fear of WMD use. But the ‘great powers’ played an almost non-existent role in the debates over US and Western responses and certainly couldn’t prevent them. What has changed today is that Washington can no longer simply call the shots when it comes to addressing perceived nuclear risks but has to consider and respond to the views and interests of powerful elites in Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi.
More than this, many of the most concerning aspects of today’s return of nuclear great power politics – including the death of strategic arms control and the return of qualitative arms racing – are the direct result of the willingness of Western actors to ignore the concerns of today’s nuclear-armed great powers over the last 20 years. The WoT and Second Nuclear Age policy frames employed, particularly by the United States and its allies over this period, downplayed issues of deterrence and nuclear stability between the great powers in favour of reducing nuclear dangers posed by non-state actors and ‘rogue’ states that were at least partly exaggerated from the outset. Today’s proponents of ‘getting ahead’ in an age of ‘great power competition’ would do well to remember the dangers of underestimating the nuclear drivers of great power politics in their policy prescriptions today.
But the nuclear politics of the WoT have not entirely disappeared from academic and policy debates. Decisions taken during this period continue to shape nuclear politics today. Security narratives, including the framing of different ‘nuclear ages’, do not neatly begin and end, and, as we have discussed above, the fusion of enduring nuclear legacies with the changed material circumstances of today’s ending of US primacy has created substantial nuclear dangers. This will require new ways of thinking about reducing nuclear risks, producing a new challenge for scholars and policymakers alike. This must start with a recognition that the WoT leaves much behind in nuclear terms even as we witness the return of nuclear great power politics in international life.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by European Research Council grant number 866155. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Managing the Atom project seminar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, and we would like to thank the participants for their useful feedback, in particular Mathew Bunn and Daniel Kroth.
Andrew Futter is Professor of International Politics at the University of Leicester, UK, and PI on the European Research Council-funded ‘Third Nuclear Age’ project.
Benjamin Zala is Fellow in the Department of International Relations in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. He is also an honorary fellow in the School of History, Politics, and International Relations at the University of Leicester, UK, where he contributes to the European Research Council-funded ‘Third Nuclear Age’ project.
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