Yes / Are nuclear weapons still relevant to global
security? Compared with the nuclear confrontation
in the depths of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and
deterrence appear to have lost their salience.
Considering the conflicts in which the major powers
engaged, the focus in strategic studies changed to
counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and subconventional conflict.2 Only recently, with the
conflict in Ukraine and the increasingly
confrontational relationship between the United
States and China has this narrative come into
question. The general perception on international
security exhibits a strange paradox. On the one
hand the US-led military interventions in
Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts, the conflicts in
the Middle East and Africa, the nuclearization of
North Korea and the conflict between India and
Pakistan among other regional security issues have
given rise to a view that the modern world is less
secure than ever, and we live in a world of chaos
riven by unpredictable patterns of violence. By
contrast, Steven Pinker has demonstrated the casualties from armed conflict are at their lowest
point in human history, and interstate warfare has
virtually ceased to exist as a phenomenon.3 The
imminence of a global nuclear war in which at a
minimum hundreds of millions of people would die
appears to have dissipated. In some respects, it
appears that war has become almost a
phenomenon of the past. Most of the recent
literature on nuclear weapons has focused on
regional crises areas, such as South Asia (India and
Pakistan) or the Korean peninsula.4 However, the
modernization of arsenals by the nuclear powers,
the integration of strategic conventional and
nuclear weapons in strategic doctrines and the
more confrontational dynamics in Great Power
politics is cited as evidence that the risk of nuclear
use is increasing. This paper contests the emerging
narratives on an increased threat of nuclear conflict
and considers the sources of insecurity in the
contemporary period and in particular the risks of
armed conflict between the United States, Russia,
and China in order to assess the role of nuclear
weapons in contemporary security.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/18560 |
| Date | 08 July 2021 |
| Creators | Bluth, Christoph |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | (c) 2021 Strategic Vision Institute. Full-text reproduced in accordance with the publisher's open access policy. |
| Relation | https://thesvi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/dr-christoh-buth.pdf |
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