Dangers are compounding. There is a sense as palpable in the public mind as among experts that the risks of nuclear conflict are growing. Discrete events inform this fear.
In 2017 and early 2018, the world came closer to nuclear war (between the United States and North Korea) than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 2020, the military forces of two nuclear powers (China and India) clashed in the Himalayas. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine defied international law, global opinion, and even the rational limits of military conquest; it has also led to both Washington and Moscow wielding veiled nuclear threats anew.
And in October 2023, Hamas’s attacks on Israel triggered a relentless reprisal against Gaza so brutal that it did not even spare women and children. Reputable organizations and politicians now charge Israel—a state whose nuclear weapons the world politely ignores—with war crimes, and the government of South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide.
These headline events take place in the context of deteriorating structural forces. Long-crucial sources of stability (regionalism, economic interdependence, arms control and disarmament regimes) have come under duress in recent years, in tandem with the resurgence of traditional sources of conflict (great-power rivalry, ethnonationalism, and sphere-of-influence geopolitics).
Something must be done, so naturally I wrote my way to a solution.
I’ve just published a big (58 pages) report counseling how to avert nuclear war in Northeast Asia. It’s part of the “Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia Project,” which itself is a multi-institutional, multi-nation effort over three years.
The link to the full report is at the bottom of this post, and there’s a much shorter Executive Summary version that’s also available. The idea though, is that:
Risks of nuclear use are much greater than I think people generally appreciate;
As a region, Northeast Asia is trending in the wrong direction, toward greater danger, in part because one man’s “deterrence” is another’s escalation; and
The US role in the region’s nuclear risks is more counterproductive than it should be or could be.
And so half of this extremely long report outlines—in painstaking detail—policy recommendations for reducing nuclear risks in Northeast Asia. At the end, it issues a call to action for every country in the region, including (especially) the United States.
The thing that I do in this report that nuclear wonks almost never do is advise about how to shape the political context within which nuclear decisions are made, meaning that tinkering in a boxed labeled “nuclear policy” is insufficient to actually reduce nuclear risks.
The Nuclear Precarity Problem
The concepts we have for grasping nuclear risks do not do justice to the dangers we face. We understand that coercion is a game of signaling threats. And we understand that strategic stability has two components: Arms-racing stability and crisis stability. We also understand that all nuclear crises are not created equal; some are more combustible than others.
So in a keynote lecture at Ritsumeikan University a few years ago, I outlined a concept I called “nuclear precarity”—a circumstance involve acute risks of nuclear escalation.
As the graphic above illustrates, “nuclear precarity” is the accumulation (really amplification) of structural and situational risks of nuclear-weapons use. If we were to plot real-life nuclear situations according to this understanding, it might look like this:
The placement of US-North Korea (2018-19) should be in the bottom-right quadrant, not the upper-left quadrant (a typo that’s my fault and will updated in a few days).
But the idea is that any relationship/rivalry that is in (or approaches) the bottom-right corner of this 2x2 (high structural risk, low situational risk) can easily be converted into a situation of nuclear precarity by leaders or militaries that decide to play coercion games of threat-making. And any situation in the upper-left quadrant is vulnerable to developing high structural risks the longer it lingers in that box.
The best case study to illustrate this is US-North Korea rivalry pre- and post-Trump: Before Trump, US-North Korea exhibited growing structural risks of nuclear war, but US rhetoric and posturing was restrained.
In 2017, all the restraint disappeared and we were left with nuclear precarity. And then once the summit diplomacy started in 2018, US-North Korea entered a period of quietude in which coercive signalling mostly disappeared while the structural risks of nuclear war actually grew (again, the placement of US-North Korea for 2018-19 should be in the bottom-right, not top-left, quadrant).
The urgent task, then, is for policymakers to move Northeast Asia from everywhere else on the matrix into the bottom-left quadrant.
But how?
A Nuclear Theory of Change
Focusing too narrowly on negotiations or arms control per se is counterproductive if the environment within which such processes occur are not ripe for it. So I organize policies according to their strategic function, as described in the graphic below.
If you want to proceed to reduce nuclear risks without self-sabotage, reciprocal negotiations with grand ambitions need to wait until other policy changes and pronouncements have shifted the larger context. Certain kinds of policies are only rationally possible under certain conditions, so if the policies you want don’t fit the conditions, you must first orient your policies toward changing the conditions.
So some of my nuclear risk=reduction advice is, perhaps paradoxically, about statecraft overall, not nuclear weapons per se.
Principles to Guide Policy Change
Some guiding principles for policy are more stabilizing than others. By drawing on the larger security studies literature and marrying it to insights from our first two years of this project, I grounded the report’s policy advice in principles of transparency; predictability; strategic empathy; and a rebalancing of deterrence and reassurance.
This is the way.
As a brief summary, here are the recommendations and how they function as warming, ripening or reciprocally transformative actions. The report breaks each of these down in some detail, including how they address either the structural or situational risk of nuclear precarity.
Warming Actions—Rhetorical and Diplomatic Gestures
Rescope extended deterrence dialogues between Japan and South Korea for risk reduction (Japan, ROK, US)
Declare mutual co-existence with China and North Korea, end to the Korean War, and recognize reciprocal vulnerability between Chinese and US nuclear forces (US)
A nuclear no-first use dialogue (China, US)
Revive the “non-offensive defense” research agenda (Japan, US, ROK)
A “No Leadership Assassinations” pledge (US, DPRK, China, ROK, Japan)
A US strategic dialogue with North Korea (US, DPRK)
Ripening Actions—Individual Restraint
A “no nuclear deployment” executive order (US)
Elevate the CTBT (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)
Checks and balances on South Korea’s “Three-Axis” deterrence policy (ROK, US)
End-use restrictions on missile and drone sales (US, China, Japan, ROK)
Codify the US moratorium on anti-satellite testing (US)
Support the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act (US, Japan, ROK, China DPRK)
Defund the nuclear-armed SLCM-N (US)
Pause and investigate permanently halting development of ground-based intermediate-range missiles (US, China, ROK, DPRK)
A declaration of nuclear inventory from North Korea and China (DPRK, China)
Rollback the US “Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent” (US)
Reciprocal Transformations—Bilateral and Multilateral Initiatives
Multilateralize a moratorium on anti-satellite testing (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)
Advanced conventional arms freeze (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)
A missile-launch notification regime (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)
A “no-dead-hand” nuclear restriction (China, DPRK, US)
A ban on low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons (China, DPRK, US)
Support a 2% defense conversion for the US and Northeast Asia (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)
A “nuclear-free seas” initiative with North Korea (DPRK, China, US, ROK)
A Call To Action
The report calls on each Northeast Asian government to take specific actions aimed at averting nuclear war and making a more peaceful region, assigning a one-page call-to-action card for each Northeast Asian government. Here’s what we call on the United States to do:
The full report is available here. ✌️
Some coverage of the report in the Asahi Shimbun.
Thanks for the summary and I look forward to reading the whole report. If Biden‘s policy in NE Asia in unhelpful, we are really in for it if we need Trump to show restraint, transparency, and empathy to reduce risks.