Is there a nuclear world order?

Editor’s note: This article is is intended to be read alongside “What is nuclear order?”

Eight decades after the introduction of nuclear weapons,^[1] hindsight shows that the interest in this emblematic weapon system of the second half of the 20th century has always been heightened by the perception of an unusual risk of use. When this interest is marked, it is dramatized: It is always a question of a “return” of nuclear weapons, in other words of the threats that accompany them, even if it means refreshing them. As most of arms control treaties have been abandoned, and particularly since Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine using its nuclear deterrent as a tool of coercion, some nuclear experts have taken to arguing that the world nuclear order has been shattered. China’s rise as a major strategic player is naturally part of this upheaval, even if perceptions of this factor still vary greatly among experts.

Writing history always gives it meaning by ordering it. To introduce a global nuclear order that contemporary factors of disorder would come up against provides a usual framework: Western strategic analysis generally respects the framework to secure or recover an order which has generally been postulated as mandatory.

However practical this approach may be, it has the disadvantage of overlooking a major problem: The world nuclear order exists only in the minds of those who postulate it. The history of nuclear power over the last 80 years is much more the story of an order in search of itself, and of the many attempts to fix it.

A nuclear age or nuclear ages? The main specific Cold War crises in the West had a latent or proven nuclear dimension: the exploitation of an alleged “missile gap”^[2] with the Soviet Union from the end of 1957 to the 1960 American presidential campaign enabled the Democratic camp to denounce the culpable weakness of the Republican camp in the face of the Soviet competitor, which placed the territory of the United States at the mercy of ballistic nuclear attacks with continental reach. The six years of the Berlin crisis^[3] were determined by the European nuclear issue and involved the use of thermonuclear weapons, with the Soviet authorities using nuclear blackmail against Western public opinion in a much more pronounced way than the Russians have done since February 2022.^[4] The Cuban crisis,^[5] intrinsically linked to the Berlin crisis, will always be remembered as the climax of the Cold War nuclear threat, although it was also the inaugural exercise in structuring bilateral strategic dialogue. Finally, the Euromissile crisis^[6] sharpened fears of a Soviet first strike, highlighted the risk of a decoupling of American and European security interests, but also affirmed the role of public opinion—in this case European – in strategic nuclear issues, which became more global than strictly international.

The high points of the post-Cold War period were in turn marked by a new nuclear apprehension: the fear of a globalised proliferation economy in the 1990s gave rise to an apocalyptic escalation whose virulence and excess we have forgotten today.^[7]  The risk of nuclear terrorism, described as an imminent threat in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on US territory, was the subject of unvarnished analysis in the first decade of the century.^[8] The strategic instability in Northeast Asia since the turn of the century, whether in terms of the North Korean regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes or the ongoing modernisation of China’s strategic forces, began to play down the transnational issues at stake at the turn of the decade 2000. The invasion of Ukraine from 2014 onwards seemed to confirm this, as it began to dramatize the idea of a return to, but also a reconsideration of, nuclear deterrence.

The 2020 decade is no exception to the rule: By launching a second campaign in Ukraine at the end of February 2022, the president of the Russian Federation is said to have proved that the world has entered a time of unprecedented perils, specific to the era: Here we have the “third nuclear age” that would be ours, made up of “strategic piracy,”^[9] “emerging and disruptive” technologies,^[10] and “strategic surprises” within a “security architecture” that would have disintegrated.

It may be useful to identify distinct nuclear eras to understand what is at work in the nuclear realm over time. But writing history always gives it meaning by ordering it. Thus, to introduce a global nuclear order that contemporary factors of disorder would come up against provides a usual framework: Western strategic analysis generally respects the framework to secure or recover an order which has generally been postulated as mandatory.

From order to disorder. However practical this approach may be, it has the disadvantage of overlooking a major problem: The world nuclear order exists only in the minds of those who postulate it. The history of nuclear power over the last 80 years is much more the story of an order in search of itself.

Initially, nuclear weapons created a major strategic imbalance in that, from then on, a single weapon carried by a single delivery system could commit mass destruction by means of a surprise attack. Coupled with the United States’ possession of nuclear secrecy, it became the instrument of a profound imbalance between adversaries. At the same time, the founding American theorist Bertrand Brodie, along with several others,^[11] formulated the idea that the strategic objective of the nuclear age was no longer to win a war but to avoid it. In this way, a new “world order” could be established: Nuclear weapons would reduce the likelihood of war if the adversaries’ second-strike capabilities were assured. In conceptual terms, it was a revolution due to a technological exceptionality that was reinforced by the invention of the thermonuclear warhead in 1952. A factor of disorder, nuclear weapons therefore had the potential to become a factor of order; strategic thinking became paradoxical, and today’s world still depends on it.

In international politics, the notion of order is always suspect, since the framework of social behaviour to be observed is that of a specifically anarchic society, that of states, prone to disorder in the absence of proven domination. It is therefore tempting to define the global nuclear order as an argument of authority imposed by the main beneficiaries of a de facto situation that divides the world into nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) correctly illustrates that the nuclear order is first and foremost the maintenance of a privilege and domination by those who have manufactured a nuclear explosive device and carried out at least one nuclear test before January 1, 1967,^[12] led by the United States and the Soviet Union, which were the main drafters of the treaty in the mid-1960s. France, through its Minister for Foreign Affairs Michel Jobert in 1973,^[13] was one of the countries denouncing the US-Soviet strategic “condominium.” The NPT sought to freeze strategic nuclear history and maintain the order it instituted with the help of a dedicated agency—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—and under the control of the United Nations Security Council. Nuclear order is therefore by no means an edifice of norms designed to limit the risks of the nuclear age. That would be a simple functional definition that ignores power relations. The reality is indeed that of a world order that has historically been criticized from all sides, but which is imposed by states that have at least a good interest in maintaining it.

The historiography of the nuclear order shows that critical thinking on the subject has been going on quietly in the West over the last 80 years. In a 1978 article for Foreign Policy, Karl Keiser, a German academic, for example, was “in search of a nuclear world order.”^[14] He began his argument by noting that a consensus had broken down on the basic rules and objectives of the global nuclear system. Eight years after the entry into force of the NPT did not, however, represent the break-up of an existing order. On the contrary, it marked the consolidation of a multilateral order established by the entry into force of the treaty in 1970.

Fourteen years later, Stanley Hoffmann published an article, translated for the French magazine Esprit, entitled “Les illusions de l’ordre mondial” (The illusions of world order), in which he argued that “in history, an order collapses when the hegemony of the dominant nation is challenged or when a hegemony fails to establish itself”.^[15] Here again, 1992 does not suggest a collapse of the world nuclear order. Seen from the beginning of 2026, it would seem to be the golden age of the American-Russian strategic dialogue, a victory for the pragmatic approach to arms control, and the consolidation of a cautious nuclear order: Nuclear powers put an end to the “arms race,” anchored the disarmament process provided for in Article 6 of the NPT, and cooperated to limit the risks of proliferation.^[16] Three years later, the fifth RevIew Conference of the parties to the treaty confirmed its extension for an indefinite period.^[17] The treaty became, as the saying goes, “the cornerstone” of a consolidated global nuclear order. Was Stanley Hoffmann wrong?

The discovery of Iraq’s nuclear programme in the summer of 1991 plunged the IAEA into shock and doubt about the safeguards system put in place by the non-proliferation regime. In May 1997, the Board of Governors approved the Model Additional Protocol to the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements, which considerably strengthens the Agency’s ability to ensure the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in non-nuclear weapons states. To date, 144 States and Euratom have brought Additional Protocols into force, while a total of 156 have been approved by the Board of Governors.[18] Ultimately, the Iraqi nuclear affair evokes both the argument of disorder and that of order. It shows, among many other illustrations, that it is indeed the occurrences of nuclear disorder that determine the dynamics of order.

Centrality or fragmentation? If the global nuclear order makes sense, it is as an empirical reality that is the result of continual invention, the extent of which depends on the quality of the cooperation of the players involved. The nuclear order is therefore neither a legal fact nor a strategic reality. Nor is it a linear historical trend. It is a political objective that constantly fluctuates according to the interests, ambitions, and resources of those who endorse it and attempt to formulate it. The question that its content raises today is that of the meaning given to it by enough of these players to qualify it.

Western strategic analysis over the last 10 years has agreed on the renewed centrality of nuclear weapons in international security relations. The start of the Russo-Ukrainian war with Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, accompanied by an initial nuclear blackmail; the exacerbation of strategic competition between the United States and China and the foreseeable increase and diversification of China’s nuclear arsenal in proportions that are difficult to determine; the assertion of the nuclear status of North Korea during the 2010s; and the modernisation of the arsenals of all the nuclear weapons states have put nuclear weapons back at the centre of the game. Admittedly, the nuclear factor had lost some of its prominence during the first two decades of post-Cold War inter-state relations. However, it should be remembered that the practitioners of nuclear deterrence never considered that it was a parameter of inter-state security that had been superseded by the disappearance of the Soviet threat after 1991.

The same practitioners know that the function of nuclear weapons in the nuclear weapons states is meant to remain permanent, subject to doctrinal and declaratory adjustments. The following can be cited as examples of this permanence in Western nuclear weapons states:

• anticipating a diversion of deterrence by terrorism of mass destruction, including nuclear terrorism, by taking account of state terrorism or state-sponsored terrorism in doctrines (by calling on the scientific discipline of nuclear forensics, the results of which are still uncertain in the United States);
• the adaptation of the US posture in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review to the scenario of limited use of nuclear weapons to de-escalate a conventional conflict;
• targeting centres of power;
• the complementary nature of deterrence through the threat of retaliation and the promise of denial;
• the perception of a risk of “aggressive sanctuarisation” by nuclear weapons, an idea which was formulated in the 1990s and partially illustrated by the current conflict in Ukraine.

Such centrality would argue in favour of consolidating the existing strategic order. Nuclear proliferation, a major fear of the 1990s, has remained contained to date: India and Pakistan, whose respective nuclear statuses since 1998 have not weakened the global non-proliferation regime but perhaps strengthened it, have been joined by North Korea, whose nuclear status has progressed since the country’s withdrawal from the NPT in 2003, and is now stronger. There is no evidence to suggest that the risk of North Korea using nuclear weapons has increased, although there are arguments in favour and arguments against. Nuclear disarmament is seriously eroding, fuelling growing impatience and anxiety among many non-nuclear weapons states and in Western public opinion. But it should be remembered that arms levels are not taking off significantly and remain well below the levels reached at the end of the Cold War. ^[19]

However, contemporary nuclear realities are showing clear signs of fragmentation. The deterioration of the Iranian nuclear dispute since 2018 has created conditions in which Iran has become a de facto nuclear threshold state, possibly on the verge of crossing it. On the night of June 12 to 13  2025, Israel launched a massive counter-proliferation operation against Iran aimed at eliminating the so-called ‘existential’ threat posed by Tehran’s advancing nuclear programme. While an extremely fragile status quo prevailed between the end of June 2025 and the beginning of 2026, the outcome will now be limited to the following alternative: Either Iran will see its programme dismantled and subject to a new, very strict inspection regime that will prevent it from progressing further towards nuclear threshold status, or Iran will remain a sovereign regional power and decide to withdraw from the NPT in order to complete a military nuclear programme and acquire a strike force that will protect the country from future preventive Israeli or American attacks. It should be added that this second option has probably already become very fragile and unrealistic, given the balance of power on the ground, the imbalance in capabilities between the two armies in a symmetrical confrontation, and Iran’s isolation in terms of regional and global military support. In the current regional and global strategic circumstances, it is difficult to envisage any realistic scenario in which the Iranian regime could continue to advance its military nuclear programme and bring it to fruition. Operation “Epic Fury” certainly suffers from a lack of concern regarding the future of strategic stability in the Middle East. But it powerfully illustrates that a non-nuclear weapon state that abuses nuclear ambiguity now runs the risk of an extremely brutal military counter-proliferation response. Whether Iran’s campaign will have a unifying or disruptive effect on the global nonproliferation regime remains an open question at this stage, since the diplomatic follow-up to the operation will largely determine the outcome.

The entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in January 2021, and its adoption by 73 States to date, is a sign of the deep rift among nations over the status of nuclear weapons in international affairs, even if this treaty is unlikely to have any strategic effect, as none of the nuclear weapons states has adopted it. The centrality of the US-Russian bilateral relationship has lost its value, while the Chinese government refuses to take part in an arms control dynamic that would take a trilateral form. The United States’ guarantee of security within the framework of its alliances in Europe and Northeast Asia is being called into question in European countries and, increasingly, in the Republic of Korea^[20] and Japan.^[21] The main guarantors of the non-proliferation regime no longer share the same strategic objectives.

Criticized from all sides but set up by states that had at least a good interest in keeping it going, the world strategic nuclear stage is subject to an instability of which at least one feature is relatively unprecedented: The play that is being performed no longer suits the very people who were the main characters in the past. In various ways, this has been true of the United States since it abandoned the ABM Treaty^[22] in 2002; it has undoubtedly been true of the Russian Federation since the end of the process of verified elimination of missiles covered by the INF Treaty^[23] in the same year; it has been true of China since a time that is more difficult to determine, but which clearly precedes Xi Jinping’s rise to power between 2008 and 2012. Such a situation indeed introduces a chaotic near future. It also points to the need to rethink joint cooperative action outside non-functional multilateral frameworks.

If we return to Hoffmann’s paradigm, we might ask ourselves whether the contemporary era is one in which one hegemony is being challenged and another is finding it difficult to establish itself. In other words, the nuclear dyarchy at work during the Cold War could not possibly have cracked without the global nuclear framework cracking in its turn. The world is still searching for a nuclear order that escapes it because the strategic nuclear fact itself cannot be ordered in the long term.

That being said, and thoroughly documented, a question remains as to whether this disorder in constant pursuit of order poses a problem and, if so, what the nature of the problem is.

The Western strategic community has long established as a benchmark the need to preserve strategic stability at the various relevant bilateral, regional, and global levels. Strategic stability is difficult to define.[24] More than a concept that has been formalized as such, it is a historical expression, a shared practice, or a phenomenon to be assessed. Thus, the question of the meaning that a speaker gives to it at a given moment and in each context is at least as important as the question of how it is measured. Until now, most of the traditional Western literature on strategic stability has rarely been concerned with this socio-political dimension. Despite its polysemy, it can be usefully assumed that strategic stability refers to a situation in which the incentives to change the status quo are less strong than the constraints on change.[25] In its most classic military nuclear sense, strategic stability implies a configuration of forces such that neither side is tempted to proceed without major risk to launch a first strike or a “surprise attack,” and therefore: (1) both parties have protected second-strike capabilities, (2) there are no strategic defences of territory against a massive attack, and (3) there is a set of political and legal instruments codifying and controlling competition between the two actors, including by prohibiting certain systems.

On this basis, future initiatives should pursue the following strategic objectives, which are essentially reminders of the fundamental principles of arms control:

• ensuring the survivability of second-strike forces;
• clarifying postures and limiting the risks of misunderstanding associated with the practice of strategic ambiguity;
• strengthening all means, cooperative or unilateral, to ensure transparency on the ground;
• preventing by all means the possibility of surprise attacks;
• strengthening the means to prevent fait accompli[26]

The reality, however disappointing it may seem to some, is that the nuclear order exists no less today than it did yesterday. One thing is certain: Nuclear weapons remain one of the key factors of power, and power is shifting and reconfiguring before our very eyes. Consequently, nuclear disorder will probably remain a constant feature of the century that has just begun.

Notes

[1] Whether we date it to the first nuclear explosive test on July 16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico, or to the first use of nuclear weapons by one state against another on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima.

[2] In the late 1950s, the term was used to describe the perception that the USSR was developing an intercontinental-range ballistic missile capability earlier, in greater numbers and with a far greater capacity than the United States, which was incorrect.

[3] From 1958 to 1963.

[4] It was on 30 October 1961 that the USSR tested the “Tsar Bomba”, the most powerful thermonuclear explosive device ever tested by a Nuclear Weapon State (NWS).

[5] 14 to 28 October 1962.

[6] From 1977 to 1987.

[7] See, for example, Jacques Attali, Economie de l’apocalypse, 1995.

[8] The conventional wisdom among Western strategic experts in the 2000s was not to ask whether nuclear terrorism would strike, but when.

[9] Thérèse Delpech, Nuclear deterrence in the 21st century, 2013.

[10] In the same way that the post-September 11 world instituted “new threats » to international security.

[11] Bernard Brodie (ed.) The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, 1946.

[12] Article IX.3 of the NPT.

[13] See, for example, “M. Michel Jobert dénonce le ‘condominium’ soviéto-américain”, Le Monde, 14 November 1973.

[14] Karl Keiser, “A la recherche d’un ordre nucléaire mondial, Réflexions sur les divergences germano-américaines en matière d’énergie nucléaire”, Politique étrangère, 1978, 43-2, pp. 145-171.

[15] Stanley Hoffmann, “Les illusions de l’ordre mondial”, Esprit, N°184, August-September 1992, pp. 88-105.

[16] The US Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) programme was launched in 1991 to limit the risks of nuclear, chemical, and biological proliferation arising from the break-up of the USSR. It initiated a series of major unilateral and multilateral initiatives that continue to shape the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction around the world.

[17] Article X.2 of the NPT states that “Twenty-five years after the entry into force of the Treaty, a conference shall be convened to decide whether the Treaty shall continue in force indefinitely, or shall be extended for an additional fixed period or periods. This decision shall be taken by a majority of the Parties to the Treaty.”

[18] As of June 2025.

[19] In the mid-1980s, the USA and the USSR held around 70,000 nuclear weapons. As a reminder, the bilateral New START Treaty, which is still in force until February 2026 even though Russia announced in February 2023 that it would “suspend” its participation, limits the number of strategic nuclear launchers deployed to 700 and the number of nuclear warheads deployed on these launchers to 1,550.

[20] See, for example, Lee Minji, “Defense minister nominee says he is open to idea of S. Korea’s nuclear armament”, Yonhap News, 2 September 2024.

[21] See, for example, Tim Kelly, Yukiko Toyoda, “Japan PM hopeful Kono calls for US assurances to deter nuclear ambitions”, Reuters, 9 September 2024.

[22] Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed by the United States and Russia in Moscow in May 1972, outdated since the withdrawal of the United States in June 2002.

[23] Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty signed between the USA and the USSR in December 1987, entered into force in June 1988, lapsed following the US withdrawal in August 2019.

[24] See Benjamin Hautecouverture, Emmanuelle Maitre, Bruno Tertrais, L’avenir de la stabilité stratégique, Recherches & Documents n°05/2021, FRS, 16 February 2021

[25] See, for instance, Elbridge A. Colby and Michael S. Gerson (eds.), Strategic Stability: Contending Interpretations, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2013. See also Lawrence Rubin and Adam N. Stulberg (eds.), The End of Strategic Stability, Nuclear Weapons and the Challenge of Regional Rivalries, Georgetown University Press, Washington DC, 2018: “To be clear, there are two main and generalizable components at the heart of strategic stability. First, strategic stability refers to a condition in which adversaries understand that altering military force posture in response to vulnerability— whether to avoid being emasculated or to pre-empt one’s opponent— would be either futile or foolish. Second, strategic stability reflects the ease with which nuclear-armed adversaries can return to stable relations after a period of escalation. Actors can maintain strategic stability even in a crisis by not responding to a provocative action.”

[26] Benjamin Hautecouverture, Emmanuelle Maitre, Bruno Tertrais, op. cit.