Doreen Horschig and Heather Williams
The risk of nuclear war is the highest it has been since the end of the Cold War. The cause lies primarily with Russia’s ongoing nuclear threats and drills amid the conflict in Ukraine, but not with Russia alone. Tensions in the Middle East may spur Iran to speed up its suspected pursuit of a nuclear weapons program. North Korea continues to modernize and expand its nuclear arsenal. And if Donald Trump wins a second term, the United States could return to nuclear testing as well, as Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien suggested in Foreign Affairs this summer.
Together, these developments represent a challenge to the institutions, rules, and taboos that have prevented the use of nuclear weapons since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But the erosion of this nuclear order is not happening in isolation. Autocratic leaders––primarily in China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia––often work in concert as part of a quest to undermine the existing international order, challenging norms related to human rights, international borders, and, increasingly, nuclear weapons. Despite the success of global diplomatic efforts to establish norms around the use of nuclear weapons, the world can no longer assume that nuclear weapons will not be used in a conventional conflict.
NUCLEAR BREAKDOWN
Norms are essentially rules of the road. They can be embodied by institutions, such as the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the 1997 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in the case of nuclear weapons. But as a “standard of appropriate behavior,” norms are not always concrete. In the nuclear order, norms can prevent states from using nuclear weapons through constraining mechanisms; the so-called nuclear taboo relies on the widespread moral and political rejection of nuclear weapons to discourage their use. Norms can also compel states to abide by their treaty commitments through prescriptive mechanisms.
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