Growing nuclear brinkmanship

The Nobel Peace Prize has often been given to people whose record as peace makers is contested. In recent years, President Obama was given this award for his efforts to promote international cooperation and peace, even though it was under his presidency that the US decided on a troop surge in Afghanistan and ramped up use of drone strikes, despite the collateral damage drones cause to innocent civilians. Giving the Nobel for peace (not economics) to Muhammad Yunus for his advocacy of micro-lending was also puzzling, especially as the correlation between poor women accessing loans and becoming socially empowered is not assured. However, the Nobel committee's decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to Nihon Hidankyo, an organisation comprised of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attack survivors, which now campaigns against nuclear weapons, is noteworthy.

We live in a world where the risk of nuclear use - either deliberate, by accident, or due to miscalculation - has grown significantly. Russia has revised its nuclear doctrine to use nuclear weapons not only in response to a nuclear attack, but also to push back against a conventional attack deemed a "critical threat" to Russia's sovereignty, or that of its allied state, Belarus. This revision of the Russian nuclear posture is meant to counter growing western support to Ukraine, but it does create a danger of an escalating nuclear conflict. North Korea has upped its nuclear capabilities over these past few years as well. The far right in Israel has threatened using the nuclear option during the ongoing assault on Gaza. Beleaguered Iran, which has seen a significant degradation of its proxies in the region, may also ramp up efforts to become a nuclear power, especially if the Israeli threat to it grows under the coming Trump administration.

In the case of South Asia, the threat of a nuclear showdown is also linked to the ongoing great power tussle which is intensifying lingering regional rivalries. China and India had two major skirmishes over contested border demarcations in the Himalayas in 2020 and 2022. While the two neighbouring Asian giants have sought to normalise the situation along their contested border for now, their acrimony is only intensifying due to America's support to India for containing China. Yet, US efforts to bolster Indian capabilities have inflamed insecurities of Pakistan, which struggles to maintain deterrence against its hostile larger neighbour.

Scholars, writing for the Brookings Institute, warned of a strategic chain reaction triggering an arms buildup in South Asia. This chain reaction compels Pakistan to maintain a nuclear deterrent against India. Increasingly, however, India needs to respond not to Pakistan but also to China. China meanwhile is upping its nuclear capabilities with an eye on the Indian posture, and to keep the US at bay.

The risk tolerance between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan has also increased because the US and China are less likely to work together to prevent their cross-border tensions from spiraling into a catastrophic conflict. A full-blown nuclear conflict in South Asia could not only cause devastation across the wider region, its environmental impact would spell disaster for the rest of the world.

At present, none of the nine countries that possess nuclear weapons - America, Russia, China, France, Britan, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea - seems interested in nuclear disarmament or arms control. Given the emergent geostrategic realities, all these nuclearised countries are modernising and bolstering their nuclear arsenals instead.

One hopes that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a movement against nuclear proliferation also nudges the international arms control regime to do more to contend with the growing risks of nuclear conflict, especially by dissuading great powers from engaging in direct as well as indirect nuclear brinkmanship.