The latest information revolution has driven the development of a new suite of non-nuclear military capabilities and a new technological context that together challenge our understanding of the global nuclear order. Long-held assumptions about strategic stability, deterrence, arms control and crisis stability are being challenged by increasingly capable ballistic missile defences, precision weapons across all military domains, cyber technologies and the introduction of Artificial Intelligence into the nuclear realm. Each of these systems is important and influential in its own right – particularly as counter-force weapons – but, taken together, the impact is magnified considerably. The time is therefore ripe to reassess the central tenets of how we think about and manage our nuclear world and unpack what this development could mean for the future of nuclear weapons, and how this might shape the prospect for the long-held goal of nuclear disarmament. This chapter argues that we stand on the cusp of a new era likely to be characterised by three pathways, only one of which might see us move towards a non-nuclear world.

The author analyzes the policy implications of the U.S. January 2019 Missile Defense Review.

The release of the Missile Defense Review is important but not because of what it tells us about the Trump administration’s priorities in the next few years. Its significance lies in the openness with which its authors in the Pentagon have chosen to discuss the purpose that the system is meant to serve.

All the world's nuclear-armed states (except for North Korea) have begun modernizing and upgrading their arsenals, leading many observers to predict that the world is entering a new nuclear arms race. While that outcome is not yet inevitable, it is likely, and if it happens, the new nuclear arms race will be different and more dangerous than the one we remember. More nuclear-armed countries in total, and three competing great powers rather than two, will make the competition more complex. Meanwhile, new non-nuclear weapon technologies — such as ballistic missile defense, anti-satellite weapons, and precision-strike missile technology — will make nuclear deterrence relationships that were once somewhat stable less so.