Nuclear weapons embody a paradox: they are, at the same time, peacekeepers and existential threats. Mahmoud Javadi explores disarmament efforts, technological disruptions, and global rivalries. In the first of a new series on the ‘nuclear politics paradox’, he reimagines pathways beyond this precarious balance, towards lasting stability
Few domains of global politics embody as stark a paradox as nuclear politics. Nuclear weapons are tools of unimaginable destruction, yet are touted as the ‘ultimate peacekeepers‘. They promise stability while simultaneously threatening the annihilation of humanity.
This paradox — a fragile order upheld by instruments of chaos — raises pressing questions. Can the precarious equilibrium endure? Or are we heading toward a tipping point where human error, technological innovation or geopolitical ambition shatters it?
A tale of two futures
Envisage a world free from nuclear shadows. The €78 billion spent on nuclear arsenals in 2023 could instead rescue the UN’s faltering Sustainable Development Goals. This wouldn’t just accelerate progress — it could prevent famine, mass displacement, and collapsing healthcare in the wake of nuclear catastrophe.
Now, consider a darker trajectory. An algorithm misfires, a hacker breaches a nuclear command-and-control system, a rogue nation defies protocols. Missiles are launched in panic; cities are reduced to ash. Humanity confronts its darkest hour. This isn’t speculative fiction: it’s the knife-edge reality in which we live each day.
Russia’s nuclear threats in the current war in Ukraine edge political discourse toward normalising the perceived advantages of nuclear use
This duality forms the core of nuclear politics, which credits instruments of annihilation with preserving peace. Advocates of deterrence point to the Cold War as proof of nuclear’s stabilising power. Yet Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine suggests otherwise. In the Ukraine war, nuclear threats cast a dark shadow over diplomacy. They fuel fear, heighten instability and subtly edge the discourse toward normalising the perceived advantages of nuclear use in Europe and elsewhere.
This exposes the razor-thin line between deterrence and disaster. The fragile equilibrium grows ever more untenable in a world splintered by mistrust and intensifying geopolitical rivalries.
Reimagining nuclear politics
The escalating geopolitical contest between the US and China sharpens the nuclear politics paradox. Competing for dominance across trade, technology, and military arenas, these countries’ nuclear postures have evolved into power projection, straining the delicate framework of global stability.
Perhaps the answer lies not in disentangling this paradox but reimagining it altogether. Regional initiatives to establish nuclear-weapon-free zones offer a compelling vision of collective security untethered from destructive arsenals. These efforts, globally replicable and particularly promising in the Middle East, could form blueprints to advance meaningful disarmament and redefine the foundations of international stability.
Emerging and disruptive technologies such as AI and quantum computing offer transformative possibilities. But they also introduce risks of miscalculation, system vulnerabilities and compromised security. To harness the potential of such innovations, we must integrate them into comprehensive disarmament frameworks, ensuring they stabilise — not destabilise — global security.
Beyond the nuclear crutch
Nuclear deterrence is a house of cards: one misstep, one miscalculation, and the illusion of stability collapses into catastrophe. Extended deterrence — the promise of nuclear protection for allies — has not secured peace; it has chained the world to the spectre of annihilation. A security system built on the logic of destruction is not security at all. It is a gamble with human survival, a game where the stakes are too high, and the players too reckless.
We must rewire the architecture of global security from the ground up, not patch it up with old doctrines. Multilateral institutions must dismantle nuclear dependence, forging security through trust, cooperative defence, and binding disarmament commitments. True peace is not the absence of war under nuclear threat — it is the eradication of the threat itself.
The promise of nuclear protection for allies has not secured peace; it has chained the world to the spectre of annihilation
Shattering the nuclear status quo requires more than policy shifts; it demands a revolution in who gets to define security. The voices of youth, women, queer communities, Indigenous peoples, grassroots movements, faith leaders, and nuclear frontline communities have long been dismissed, excluded, ignored. Yet, they are the ones who see nuclear weapons not as abstractions, but as existential threats. Civil society is not a footnote in this debate; it is the force capable of breaking the grip of nuclear exceptionalism.
The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Japanese grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors. The award is not just recognition — it is a warning that the nuclear weapons system is a system designed to fail; that such weapons’ existence is an existential gamble; and that disarmament is not idealism, but survival. The fight of these atomic bomb survivors is not mere history — it is the only future worth building.
The mirage of disarmament?
For decades, ‘a world without nuclear weapons’ has been an enduring aspiration and a contentious rallying cry. At the heart of this vision stands the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). This Treaty, which came into force in 1970, delicately balanced the dual imperatives of global security and disarmament. Yet, its progress often resembles a cautious waltz, slowed by the competing agendas of its signatories.
In stark contrast, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), enforced in 2021, strides onto the global stage with bold conviction. It unapologetically champions a world free from the nuclear shadow.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear weapons seeks to dismantle the entrenched nuclear order, but nuclear states dismiss it as unsuited to geopolitical reality
Celebrated by many nations and activists as a moral breakthrough, the TPNW seeks to dismantle the entrenched nuclear order. However, its idealism collides with the pragmatic calculations of nuclear-armed states, which dismiss it as utopian and unsuited to a fractured geopolitical reality. Can these two treaties — one pragmatic, the other visionary — forge a genuine convergence to unify global disarmament efforts? And if such common ground exists, what path might lead us there?
A call to critical contemplation
Nuclear security is a precarious illusion — one miscalculation away from catastrophe. The path forward is not to refine this fragile balance but to dismantle it entirely. Doing so demands more than ideals; it requires bold, uncompromising action, grounded in critical reflections that challenge entrenched doctrines and reimagine security itself.
Enduring disarmament must cease to be the exception and become the foundation of a future in which peace is no longer held hostage by the threat of annihilation.
