In our new CONVOCO! Podcast Corinne M. Flick speaks with Nina Tannenwald, Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, about:
Is the Nuclear Threat Rising?
Here’s what she said:
Very unfortunately, we are in a new nuclear arms race. This one will be far more dangerous than the first one. It will be a three-sided race, including China, and thus be much more unstable than the two-sided race of the Cold War.
The prospects for any kind of formal arms control agreement are very slim. That doesn’t mean these countries shouldn’t be talking to each other.
The political and normative costs of using a nuclear weapon would be tremendous. Even if they have some military utility, the political costs overwhelm any military utility nuclear weapons might have. Once you use a tactical nuclear weapon, the risk of escalation is very real. You never know whether it could trigger a full-scale nuclear war.
Once the Cold War was over, people were optimistic about a new era of cooperation between the great powers […] Now we are in a moment of much more intense geopolitical hostility. Rather than fading away, nuclear weapons are being re-legitimized, and they are part of this new geopolitical competition.
When we look at the history of disarmament and arms control. There’s been a very important role for civil society groups, NGOs, and civil society advocacy for more restraint from the nuclear armed states.
We’re not very close to a no first use policy in the world. But that would really reduce the risk of getting into an inadvertent nuclear war, especially through miscalculation and misperception.