By Henry Sokolski
The world is entering a new era of nuclear proliferation. As alliance loyalties wane, hostile and friendly nuclear weapons proliferation is becoming more likely. As in the 1950s and 1960s, security analysts are increasingly worried about the prospect of nuclear use. To hedge against these concerns, Washington must bolster its overseas security pledges, tighten existing nuclear controls, and transition to a new generation of warfare, in which the use of nuclear weapons is less likely.
HOW BAD CAN IT GET?
China is building up its nuclear arsenal. Officials in South Korea and Japan are openly discussing developing their own nuclear weapons options. So, too, are officials in Poland and Germany, as well as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Welcome to the latest era of nuclear proliferation, in which not just our enemies, but also our friends, lust for the bomb and where our alliance system is not nearly as great a brake on those impulses as it once was.
Early in the Cold War, nuclear proliferation was disciplined by the Warsaw Pact-NATO rivalry. Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Israel acquired nuclear weapons and a number of Soviet satellites and Western-friendly nations (e.g., Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Yugoslavia, Romania) considered acquisition. By the 1970s, binary rivalries (e.g., Brazil-Argentina, India-Pakistan, Iran-Iraq, North and South Korea, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China) largely propelled nuclear proliferation.
Today, U.S. allies – South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Turkey—which previously toyed with acquiring nuclear weapons in the 1970s, are returning to this fetish. Poland, which is new to the game of nuclear weapons machinations, can be added to this list. Others, for instance Turkey, see acquiring nuclear weapons as a way to bolster their regional aspirations. Meanwhile, in South Korea, some believe acquiring nuclear weapons could help them confederate with their neighbor to the north.
In the greater Middle East, motives for going nuclear are more complicated. Saudi Arabia sees nuclear weapons as a hedge against Iranian bombs. If Tehran goes nuclear, the United Arab Emirates may follow Riyadh’s example. Saudi Arabia has already secured security guarantees from a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and there’s loose talk of working with Turkey on security cooperation as well. How Egypt and Algeria will view these developments is unclear, but Israeli observers are already worried that these two may go nuclear as well.
DENIAL
Washington has largely ignored these proliferation possibilities. The latest National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy identify only Iran and North Korea as nuclear proliferation worries. Some security experts have suggested that “friendly” proliferation to countries like South Korea orSaudi Arabia are inevitable and might even be beneficial.
Then there are the military realists who suggest that whatever friendly or hostile proliferation threats there might be, none are greater than the nuclear threats China and Russia pose. If America can deal with Beijing and Moscow, they argue, it can deal with any lesser nuclear power. Finally, those who think more nuclear weapons might be better insist that every nuclear state will automatically deter every other—and that this, in turn, will allow America to disengage and reduce its own defense spending on allies.
Yet if the last century’s two largest security catastrophes – World War I and World War II – are any indication, much of this thinking is magical. Prior to both wars, alliance diplomacy and deterrence failed. In 1939, Poland tried to save itself by signaling a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany. This, however, only egged Hitler on. Meanwhile, Stalin, not fully sensing the Nazi danger, agreed to help Germany invade Poland in exchange for Polish territory. Similarly, before World War I, Europe frantically cut secret diplomatic security guarantees and simultaneously planned military mobilizations.
The assumption in 1914 and 1939 was these sophisticated maneuvers could produce stability. They did not. Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s eleventh-hour forward deployments of B-17s to the Philippines and of the Western Fleet to Pearl Harbor proved to be feckless. They didn’t deter; they only encouraged the Japanese to launch devastating first strikes.
These disappointments helped shape sounder policies that emerged during the Cold War. First, America created security alliances (including NATO, SEATO, ANZUS), established security pacts with Japan and South Korea, and made commitments to defending the Republic of China (Taiwan). The United States backed these guarantees with the world’s largest navy and air force and the forward deployment of large numbers of nuclear weapons. The latter deployments were required early on because the United States lacked accurate long-range nuclear bombers and missiles. Once the Pentagon acquired such systems, however, America was able to withdraw almost all of its forward-deployed nuclear weapons, which were becoming increasingly vulnerable to first strikes.
Finally, the United States leveraged its security guarantees to keep its allies from “going nuclear.” The aim here was to keep America’s friends tightly aligned with U.S. efforts to defeat the Communist Bloc. American strategists from Schlesinger to Wohlstetter to Kissinger understood that as the number of nuclear-armed states increased, each would have more agency to act independently of Washington. As a result, more nuclear states would be worse rather than better.
STRENGTHENING EXTENDED DETERRENCE
Washington needs to recapture the non-proliferation wisdom of the Cold War. At a minimum, Washington needs to strengthen existing security ties with our European, Middle Eastern, and Asian allies to allay their security anxieties. In the case of NATO, Washington needs to get serious in opposing Russian adventurism: Any peace reached between Kyiv and Moscow needs to be on terms acceptable to Ukraine. The United States and NATO also must work more closely to meet their respective military and homeland security requirements.
In the Middle East, America and its closest allies should develop alternative shipping routes to the Strait of Hormuz for getting fossil fuels out of the Gulf. Washington and its allies should also help rebuild, expand, and make the region’s critical civilian infrastructure more resilient to military attacks.
Meanwhile, Washington should work with South and East Asia nations to fend off undesirable Chinese influence and adventurism. Besides military cooperation, the United States can work with these countries to counter Beijing’s soft efforts to win the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of their regional neighbors.
As for nuclear guarantees, the United States needs to increase the depth and frequency of joint nuclear exercises and consider the RAND Corporation’s proposal to create nuclear escrow accounts. Doing so would encourage American allies that have expressed a desire for nuclear weapons to pay to refurbish surplus U.S. nuclear weapons slated for dismantlement. These restored weapons should be placed in escrow at a nuclear storage site within the United States. The U.S. military would continue to conduct joint nuclear exercises with these nations. It also would build hardened nuclear weapons storage sites on their soil. Washington would only move weapons to these sites, however, in case of war.
Taking such steps will likely provoke Moscow and Beijing. However, Washington and its allies should only relent if China and Russia are willing to restrain their own nuclear misbehavior. The United States and its allies might demand that Russia redeploy all its nuclear weapons to sites east of the Urals and to open these sites to intrusive routine inspections. In exchange, Washington could promise not to redeploy American nuclear weapons, and even to withdraw the handful it has based in Europe. As for China, Washington could promise to freeze any U.S. nuclear weapons redeployments to either Japan or South Korea. In exchange, the United States could ask for a moratorium on all “peaceful” Chinese fast reactor and reprocessing activities.
As more nations consider getting nuclear bombs of their own, the United States should strengthen existing nuclear nonproliferation rules. Stronger regulations would help distinguish violators from the law-abiding states — a distinction is essential to enforcement. 
Unfortunately, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) charter don’t clearly define what dangerous nuclear activities are. These should include making nuclear fuel by enriching uranium and recycling plutonium, processes that can bring non-weapons states within days or weeks of acquiring nuclear bombs.
There is nothing in the NPT or the IAEA charter, however, that clearly authorizes these activities. In fact, negotiators on the NPT explicitly rejected efforts to include them in the treaty’s text. The reason why was simple: the negotiators understood that nuclear fuelmaking was too close to bombmaking. By the time any military diversion of nuclear fuelmaking could be detected, there wouldn’t be enough time to intervene to prevent a bomb from being built. It’s time to drive this point home again. The United States and other like-minded nations need to interpret the NPT to prohibit non-weapons states from engaging in these activities.
Another loophole worth eliminating is the ease with which nations can withdraw from the NPT. North Korea, which violated the NPT, withdrew with impunity in 2003. Iran is threatening to do so now. Iran’s exit should be blocked: no country that has promised not to get nuclear weapons should be able to break this promise without immediately being sanctioned for doing so, much less be allowed to withdraw before they come back into compliance.
Finally, the treaty clearly prohibits countries from providing or acquiring nuclear weapons or control over them, either directly or indirectly, or to manufacture or otherwise acquire them or seek or receive assistance to do so. There is nobody in charge of enforcing this provision. The IAEA says it can only monitor the presence or absence of special nuclear materials. It lacks the expertise or the authority to look for nuclear weapons. The United Nations Security Council, meanwhile, lacks a secretariat to oversee adherence to the NPT. At a minimum, the permanent members of the Security Council—China, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—should attempt to take on this responsibility and let a majority determine violations.
TOWARD NEW GENERATION WARFARE
Will tightening these nuclear rules end the further spread of nuclear weapons? No, but it could delay it. That’s important. Military science is progressing. For the last 100 years, military planners have been seized with the possibility that air forces could defeat or deter enemies by either physically obliterating them or threatening to do so. This organizing principle, air war theory, received a boost with the development of nuclear weapons.
Recently, a new theory of combat—new generation warfare—has emerged. It promises to use the manipulation, exploitation, collection, and sharing of information to disable and deter adversaries without having to physically decimate them.
This form of warfare has been playing out in the war in Ukraine. In four years, Russia has killed roughly 15,000 Ukrainian civilians. This is a large number, but it’s nowhere near as many as were killed in a day during World War II: the bombing of Tokyo alone killed over 100,000 Japanese residents in a two-hour firebombing.
Also, what Russia has been targeting isn’t Ukraine’s population per se, but their will to fight. Moscow believes it can break Ukrainian morale by disabling specific military and civilian infrastructure nodes rather than totally obliterating Ukrainian cities.This new form of warfare could conceivably push nations’ reliance on indiscriminate nuclear strikes further into the background. The nuclear option wouldn’t go away, but it would be much less likely to be exercised. Nations would still wage wars, but the drive to go nuclear might recede. That would be a good thing.
Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. He was deputy for nonproliferation policy in the Department of Defense (1989–1993), and is the author of China, Russia, and the Coming Cool War (2024). This commentary first appeared in DEFENSE DOSSIER.
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