4 Conclusion

This survey suggests that while there is quite a lot of continuity in the nuclear order, the post-Western world will have some distinctive twists. Technological breakthroughs in BMD or ASW could change the game in significant ways. The club of great powers might legitimise proliferation amongst those admitted to its ranks, while still seeking to deny it to lesser powers. The problem of nuclear proliferation is not going to go away, and under some scenarios might increase considerably. The two most worrying scenarios within that are unstable local deterrence relationships, especially those where the factors for instability are both political and technological, and the proliferation of nuclear capability to extremist non-state actors. The latter would be a profound gamechanger in many ways.

But while there may be a lot of continuity within the realm of nuclear deterrence, there is also a significant change in the context of that realm to consider. During much of the nuclear age that began in 1945, nuclear weapons have occupied a singular place in the larger story of the human race. They were the first, and for some decades the only, means by which humankind could commit species suicide. As such, they marked a kind of historic landmark in the evolution of the species, and one that it fortunately survived, although not without some close calls, most dramatically during the Cuba missiles crisis. But increasingly, nuclear weapons no longer hold this unique quality. As spelled out in the literature on “existential threats” cited above, humankind now has a variety of means to hand with which it might terminate its own existence. These range from experiments in high-energy physics, through global warming, planetary pollution, and engineered viruses, to self-reproducing nanotechnology (“grey goo”), and the arrival of the so-called singularity,in which some form of intelligence higher than that of the mark-1 human being decides to treat humankind as vermin. Humankind is also now more aware of threats from nature that might achieve the same end: space rocks hitting the planet, super-volcanoes, naturally evolved viruses, and suchlike. This wider context means that the existence of humankind is now precarious in ways that either did not exist a few decades ago, or which existed but were not understood. This change in context does not diminish the importance of the issue of nuclear weapons, but it does put it into a different perspective. Nuclear weapons are now only one amongst many species-threatening technologies, and while they may have been considered problemsolving in relation to the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, it is much less clear what utility they have in the face of the many shared-fate problems that seem likely to dominate world politics in the coming decades. Controlling the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons is now just one item on a growing list of pressing shared-fate issues on the agenda of global international society.

Edited by Anthony Alonso, Zhang Guoshuai, Xie Lei