DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .
Introduction to the Yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (abridged)
In 2025 the world marks the 80th anniversary of the only times that nuclear weapons have been used in war—the bombings of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki three days later. In those eight decades, a great deal of death and destruction has been meted out in war but the taboo against using nuclear weapons has survived and grown stronger. This is, as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee noted when awarding the 2024 Peace Prize to the movement of Japanese nuclear survivors (hibakusha), Nihon Hidankyo, ‘an encouraging fact’. Nonetheless, new risks mean it is worth reviewing today’s nuclear challenge.
Nuclear weapons pose existential risk for the world population, as does ecological disruption, the impact of which on peace and stability is starting to be felt in a context in which insecurity is already on the rise for other reasons. The 2020s have so far seen more numerous armed conflicts compared to the previous three decades, with higher war fatalities and increased displacement of people. Great power confrontation has returned to levels of intensity not experienced since the end of the cold war in 1989–91, including the articulation of nuclear threats.
It can therefore be no surprise that, in 2024, global security showed no overall improvement and some deterioration compared to the previous year. Several armed conflicts—not least in Ethiopia, Gaza, Myanmar and Sudan— continued to escalate. Though the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024 offered the prospect of an end to the country’s civil wars, a sustainably peaceful outcome was far from certain. Overall, the international capacity for peaceful conflict management continued to seem not quite up to its extraordinarily challenging tasks. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine continued, confrontation over Taiwan deepened, tensions on the Korean peninsula sharpened, and global politics were marked by increasing divisiveness and polarization sown by, among other causes of disputation, Israel’s devastating offensive in Gaza. . .
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Can we abolish all nuclear weapons?
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New uncertainties originated in the November 2024 election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. These played out in the first quarter of 2025 once he had taken office and quickly came to occupy the foreground in discussion of world affairs . . .
The president made explicit territorial claims for Greenland, for Canada (though the degree of seriousness of this was hard to gauge), for control of the Panama Canal, and for Gaza, as a US-owned holiday resort after expelling all Palestinians. He evinced apparent acceptance of Russia retaining territory it controlled due to its illegal invasion of Ukraine, while demanding access to Ukraine’s mineral resources, and refused to back two United Nations resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion. . . .
The second Trump administration rolled back US policy on climate change, encouraging the fossil fuel companies to turn away from any plan for an energy transition. Financial oversight came under attack with the firing of more than 12 inspectors-general responsible for fiscal propriety in federal government agencies and departments. This was part of a broader attack on the federal bureaucracy .
In the first quarter of 2025, therefore, both allies and adversaries of the USA and all those in between found themselves navigating uncharted geopolitical and economic waters. The policies and stances of the Trump administration in its first weeks may not all endure for its full four years. But some will likely persist and embed themselves deep enough in American policy that the next administration, even if it is not cut from Trumpian cloth, will find it hard to do away with them entirely. This is the complex background to discussing the nuclear challenge in the coming years. This chapter first looks at the current state of arms control (section II), then at the prospects of a new nuclear arms race (section III), before returning to the context of a world order in crisis (section IV), in order to discuss how the nuclear challenge might be addressed (section V).
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