The return of the nuclear threat
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map.
Humanity has lived with nuclear weapons for so long — 80 years, this year — without destroying itself, that we sometimes take them for granted. But there's no guarantee that our run of luck will continue. In fact, the risks are growing and transforming.
The recent round of fighting between India and Pakistan, the most serious violence between the two nuclear rivals in decades, is a reminder that the risks of nuclear escalation have not disappeared. But that doesn't mean the risks are exactly the same as they used to be.
The 'nuclear age,' can be divided into three parts: The first, from the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 until the end of the Cold War, was characterized by arms build-ups and the ever-present threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. The second, a roughly 30-year period after the end of the Cold War, was marked by arms control agreements, a reduction in the threat of nuclear war, and new concerns like nuclear terrorism and proliferation to rogue regimes like North Korea.
The third age is just beginning. In his new book, The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon, leading nuclear security analyst Ankit Panda introduces readers to a new era that began in roughly the mid-2020s. This new era is characterized by renewed tensions between the world's superpowers, the emergence of China as a third major nuclear power, the collapse of Cold War-era arms control treaties, and new and potentially destabilizing technological developments like cyberwar and artificial intelligence. The war in Ukraine, the largest conventional war in decades and one that nuclear threats have loomed over from the start, was the most vivid illustration yet of the dynamics of this new era.
In an interview with Vox, Panda, the Stanton senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a widely cited authority on all things nuclear, discussed the dynamics of our new nuclear world and how Donald Trump's return to the White House could raise nuclear risks.
When nuclear weapons first appeared, leaders and experts expected that their use would just become routine. They'd be just another tool in the arsenal. That, thankfully, hasn't happened.
So is there a case to be made that deterrence, the idea that countries will avoid using weapons because of the risks of retaliation, just works? Are leaders too afraid of the dangers of these weapons to actually use them, and maybe the risks of nuclear war aren't as high as we might think?
I wouldn't go that far. The presence of nuclear weapons does induce a degree of caution in national leaders, militaries, and policymakers in general. But I consider myself something of a deterrence pessimist in that I believe deterrence is real, that it has the effects that its practitioners seek, but I'm not assured that deterrence itself can be rendered perfectly safe because rendering deterrence perfectly safe is something of an oxymoron.
Deterrence is about the manipulation of useful risk. We endlessly debate what level of risk we should be willing to tolerate when it comes to the practice of nuclear deterrence, but we know from the Cold War that there have been instances of organizational failure and human miscalculation that easily could have led to the use of nuclear weapons.
Ultimately, nuclear weapons are a human invention. Nuclear deterrence is an enterprise that requires the involvement of fallible, human organizations.
Longer term, making sure that we keep nuclear weapons unused is going to require a lot more active tending of this incredibly complex enterprise that's growing a lot more complicated by the day.
This past month, we saw a real-world demonstration of some of the dynamics you write about in the book, in the brief but very intense conflict between India and Pakistan, two nuclear rivals. What do you think that incident tells us about how crises like this are likely to play out in this new nuclear age?
I think we can describe what we saw last week between India and Pakistan as the first South Asian nuclear crisis of this third nuclear range. Both countries have tried to rewrite the rules of their mutual coexistence under the nuclear shadow. [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi's government has for years been interested in calling Pakistan's 'nuclear bluff.' It wanted to find ways to inflict punishment on the Pakistanis with military force for what India perceives as state-backed terror, and it did exactly that.
I think it's fair to say that what we saw was the most intense multidomain, air-to-air and air-to-ground engagement between two nuclear-armed countries ever. We've never seen anything like this in the nuclear age.
Does that imply that India is simply no longer afraid of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent or no longer takes it seriously? India has taken steps to avoid escalation with Pakistan in the past, in part because of nuclear fears, but Modi said in his speech following the end of this most recent conflict that India would no longer give in to what he called 'nuclear blackmail.'
I argue in my book that what we call nuclear blackmail is actually just nuclear deterrence. We're simply applying a value judgment to the deterrer: In this case Pakistan, but it's also how Vladimir Putin's nuclear signaling is described in European and American commentary about the war in Ukraine.
When it comes to Pakistan's nuclear signaling, it had several audiences. One was, of course, the Indians, and I think this crisis perhaps told the Pakistanis that some of the older assumptions they might have retained about the ways in which India would be deterred are no longer sufficient.
The second is the United States. This is what really gave me concern in the early days of the crisis. Traditionally, we in the United States have seen a pressing national interest in preventing India and Pakistan from getting into direct clashes, but this is a very different Washington, and based on the statements from the administration, it wasn't clear that the US saw it as in its interest to get involved. But then whatever the US saw in its intelligence reports changed that pretty quickly.
So initially, you saw JD Vance coming out and saying this is none of our business, then very soon after was working the phones with the Indian prime minister. I suspect what we saw was the Pakistanis beginning to either talk about moving their nuclear weapons around or actually moving nuclear weapons around in a way that convinced the United States that, if the escalation continued, we could end up in a place where things could get really ugly.
I think we saw that we still have an interest in not seeing the nuclear taboo broken anywhere in the world. And I think even if your worldview is that we should be placing America first, that interest doesn't fundamentally change.
Over the past few weeks, we've seen more non-nuclear countries talk about whether they should get their own weapons. Several countries in Europe are talking about it. There's a very active debate in South Korea. Do you think we could see more countries going nuclear in a world where US security guarantees seem a little less ironclad than they used to?
The United States has played a vital, I would argue, load-bearing function in global non-proliferation, by virtue of extending its own nuclear defense to a long list of countries around the world. There's more than 50 countries to which the United States extends assurances that it will use all of its military capabilities, including nuclear weapons if necessary, to defend these allies.
I should emphasize that these allies, at no moment, really have been perfectly assured. This is fundamentally a promise that the United States makes that's very difficult to render fully credible. We're essentially telling non-nuclear countries, including some that share borders with countries like China — like North Korea, like Russia — that we would be willing to run the risk of nuclear war on their behalf. And that sounds a little crazy, and from the perspective of our allies, that's part of the reason why they've been very skittish, historically, about the statements our national leaders make.
So, as we sort of live through the first few months of the second Trump administration, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the level of interest among many allies of the United States in acquiring nuclear weapons is higher than it has been in decades. Again, not everything about this new nuclear age is new. During the Cold War, we did have prominent concerns from allies about these very same issues. The West Germans wanted nuclear weapons. The South Koreans had a covert nuclear program that the United States put in the box in the late 1970s. So we've been here before.
But, of course, today, the kinds of dynamics we're seeing now are fundamentally a lot more serious. Because I would argue that the United States is currently in the process of relitigating its entire grand strategy. It is rethinking the role that it sees for itself in the international system and its relationship to long-standing alliances. So this increases the pull of nuclear weapons [for some countries].
Now, does this mean that nuclear proliferation is preordained in the 21st century and the third nuclear age? I don't think so. I think for a variety of very good reasons, allies will be very careful about how they choose to proceed, even if they have a national conversation about whether nuclear weapons potentially answer some of the sources of insecurity they currently perceive. Even if they answer that question in the affirmative, there's a second question that they then have to ask, which is, well, how do we get them, and what would the costs be? That is where things start to get a lot more complicated.
What do you think is going to be the lasting legacy of the war in Ukraine on the nuclear weapons front? On the one hand, we've seen the threat of nuclear weapons brandished by Vladimir Putin in a really alarming way. On the other hand, the fact that nuclear weapons haven't been used, shows that deterrence and the taboos against their use are still at least partly in effect, right?
I mean, my book exists because of the Ukraine war. I think the Ukraine war has been the biggest wake-up call, [showing] that we have arrived in this new nuclear era where we, once again, need to think about the possibility of global nuclear conflict.
It's not that we live in the world of the Cold War, where we are worried about massive nuclear exchanges or first-strike scenarios. I think the most likely scenario leading to nuclear use today would be a conventional war or a crisis that either directly implicates the nuclear-armed states or implicates their national interests in a way that's likely to draw them into a conflict.
I think Ukraine is the first conflict, in many ways, of this new nuclear age, in that it has definitely tested many of our beliefs about nuclear deterrence and has really revealed the opportunities and limitations with deterrence. Deterrence has been beneficial for both NATO and Russia in seeking their political ends: Russia to carry out its conventional war, NATO to support Ukraine militarily.
Both Russia and NATO have respected fundamental red lines as they perceive them on the other side, but at the same time, each party has been frustrated with its ability to fully implement its plans. If Russia were more successful with its nuclear threats, NATO wouldn't be in the position where it ended up supplying Ukraine and ensuring that Ukraine could put up an effective conventional military resistance. Similarly, NATO hasn't been able to implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine or put its own boots on the ground. So deterrence doesn't solve all your problems, but it certainly is an important factor in shaping the modern battlefield between nuclear-armed countries and their patrons.
When it comes to the current administration, Donald Trump has made several comments about how seriously he takes the threat of nuclear war, and he's even proposed 'denuclearization' talks with China and Russia. But do you see any signs that this kind of talk is actually being turned into policy?
I don't see a big policy push on arms control or even nuclear policy matters. The Trump administration, for the moment, doesn't appear to be deeply interested in questions of nuclear policy, and so things are really just on autopilot from where the Biden administration left off.
That said, Donald Trump certainly has spoken about nuclear weapons quite a bit. He's cited them as an existential threat to humanity. He's pointed out on multiple occasions that he sees nuclear war as a greater threat to mankind than climate change. And he has said for decades that he does have an interest in something resembling arms control. In the 1980s, he even said that one of his greatest dreams of life was to negotiate an arms control agreement.
So I do think as a second-term president, he does appear to be more concerned with matters pertaining to his personal legacy. I think that explains some of what we've seen with regard to talk of, for instance, territorial conquest of Canada, Greenland, and Panama, and so we might see a similar impulse as he tries to renormalize relations with Russia, to broach the topic of arms control.
Now the risk here is, of course, that the Russians will be a lot better prepared. I think the Russians have a policy process at the moment that will lead to them having a much clearer sense of what they would want to ask of the United States in that arms control negotiation. Arms control has always been a means to advance national security. It hasn't been an end in itself.
During the first Trump administration, Trump did authorize his envoys to try to seek arms control breakthroughs with both Russia and China. It just so happened that at the time, neither country really saw a national interest-based case for engaging with the United States in good faith on arms control.
So it's possible that we get arms control. It just might not be the kind of arms control agreement that would advance US or allied national interests.
Next year, we're going to see the expiration of New START, the last significant treaty putting limits on the size of the US and Russian nuclear arsenal. What happens after that? Could we see the kind of arms build-ups we saw during the Cold War again?
The idea that we're going back to a world of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons is just not consistent with the current state of the nuclear enterprise. It would just be incredibly costly. But what I think the end of New START will mark is the formal arrival of a more dangerous, multipolar nuclear era to which the United States will look to respond, and there's a really active debate about how it will respond.
One of the fundamental changes for the United States, in particular, but also for American allies and even non-ally countries like India, is the remarkable shift that we've seen in China's approach. We don't understand exactly why that change has happened, but the change is that China has moved from a nuclear force that for decades remained fairly low in terms of numbers to a nuclear force that the US intelligence community now estimates will potentially reach 1,500 warheads by the mid 2030s.
That's still less than the current deployed nuclear force that the United States and Russia maintain under new START. But the question for the United States if you're looking at Russia as well as China, as well as a North Korea that probably is soon going to have as many warheads as China did at the start of the start of the 2020s, is whether the US might need more tools in its nuclear to
\olkit. This, I think, is going to be the fundamental question for the Trump administration.
There are realistic things the US could do, like it could put additional nuclear warheads on intercontinental missiles and submarine-launched missiles that, for arms control reasons, largely have deployed for a number of years with less than the total number of warheads they can accommodate.
But if Russia and China determined that the US response to this new environment will require them to also make adjustments to their own nuclear postures, we end up in an arms race, and we end up in a world where we face greater nuclear dangers because all three of the major nuclear powers will see incentives to posture their nuclear and conventional forces in more dangerous ways.
It certainly seems, as you note in the book, that despite the growing dangers, nuclear weapons are still not as prominent in our political debates or the culture (Oppenheimer notwithstanding) as they were in the Cold War. Certainly, younger generations don't have the same visceral experience with this as those who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis or the 1980s arms build-ups did. Do we, as Americans, particularly younger Americans, need to be more worried about nukes?
For me, I lived in India in 1998, the year India tested a nuclear weapon. The next year, in 1999, India and Pakistan fought a war in the nuclear shadow. And so, I'm a millennial, but that gives me a perspective that's not too common in the United States or in the West. I think millennials and Gen Z, these generations that have come of age in largely peaceful and prosperous Western countries in the aftermath of the Cold War, will need to wrap their heads around this really important source of catastrophic risk for humanity.
There's a fine line between being alarmist and trying to inform the public, and I hope my book walks that tightrope appropriately. It's not that, you know, I think we all need to run around with our hair on fire about global thermonuclear war breaking out at any moment, but the message for future generations is that nuclear weapons very much deserve our attention, especially in democracies where citizens vote for their lawmakers and for their national leaders.
In the United States, when it comes to matters of nuclear war, the president has absolute authority. There's not a second center of decision-making. The greatest way we could actually mitigate some of these risks is to have more conscientious national leaders.
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