Debak Das
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
I guess it could happen in theory. But one of the things that's really important to keep in mind is that The big constraint that all of these states have is the Non-Proliferation Treaty, right? So in that agreement, they all essentially agreed not to develop their own nuclear weapons.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
And a big risk that we're seeing here is that all of those discussions around the potential for nuclear weapons could also actually end up destabilizing the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which wouldn't be a good thing for global security.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
And then, of course, there's also the technical constraint, which is that developing a nuclear program is something that would take a lot of time and would take a lot of investment.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
And so because all of these states are essentially needing to scale up their armies and so on, there's also a big trade-off between investing in a new nuclear program, which would be a huge cost sink at first, and balancing that with buying perhaps more off-the-shelf conventional capabilities.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
Well, interestingly, UK nuclear weapons already protect NATO member states as well. People usually focus on, when they think about extended deterrence in Europe, they usually focus on the four deployed nuclear weapons that the US has stationed in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and Italy. But the UK nuclear arsenal already protects NATO as such.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
So that means every day that the nuclear submarine is at sea, it's just down to the UK prime minister to decide whether nuclear weapons are launched or not. So if the US was to decide that it no longer wants to maintain that cooperation with the UK, the UK wouldn't immediately fall off a cliff edge.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
It would still have some time to figure out what it needs to do, but it would essentially in the longer term needs to figure out how to service those missiles.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
It's hugely concerning, of course. Those countries might all have real security concerns, but the challenge is that if they were to develop nuclear weapons, it would also have a knock-on effect on the security concerns of their neighbors.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
So my worry would essentially be that if we have additional countries developing nuclear weapons for their own security concerns, which might be perfectly legitimate, we end up in a global environment that is essentially much more insecure because we have more nuclear weapons to go around. We have more nuclear-armed states developing
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
that would essentially need to take each other into account when they make various strategic calculations. And we also can absolutely foresee that, like, if, for example, Turkey was to acquire nuclear weapons, then Iran would probably also want to finish its nuclear acquisition. And then Saudi Arabia might also actually want to acquire nuclear weapons.
WSJ What’s News
Trump Prompts Rethink of Nuclear-Weapons Deals
And we also need to keep in mind that we've been really lucky not to have ended up in a nuclear war so far. But the more nuclear armed states you have, the greater your chance that a war between any one of them is going to go nuclear at some point.