The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon, Ankit Panda, Polity, £25

Right now, somewhere in the immediate vicinity of President Donald Trump, is an ordinary-looking bag. Its companion, also nearby and perhaps somewhere on his person, is a laminated card. Both have charming nicknames – the ‘football’ and the ‘biscuit’ – quite at odds with the outcome should a president of the United States ever decide to use them. The ‘biscuit’ bears a nuclear authentication code, generated daily. The ‘football’ contains nuclear strike options. The president may at any time and entirely on his or her own authority use these to launch some of America’s thousands of nuclear weapons. Given the psychological pressures on an individual faced with such a momentous decision – the time required to detect and verify a Russian nuclear launch might leave the president with just 15 minutes to respond – it often comes as a chilling surprise to people, writes Ankit Panda in The New Nuclear Age, that the President requires no input or sign-off from anyone else to press the button.

Presidential authority over US nuclear weapons dates back to President Truman in 1945 but, 80 years on, much else has changed. Panda argues that we are now entering a third nuclear age. The first age was the nuclear-armed superpower standoff of the Cold War. The second began with the end of the Cold War and focused on arms reduction and non-proliferation: limiting the number of new states acquiring nuclear weapons and trying to stave off the threat of nuclear or radiological terrorism. ‘The decade beginning in 2020 marks a transition’, writes Panda, ‘to a new, more dangerous, and more complex third nuclear age.’ The New Nuclear Age is an essential primer for this emerging era. It is an important, highly-readable exploration – at once fascinating and sobering – of how geopolitics and rapidly-changing technologies have begun to shape our nuclear future. It is also a clear-eyed assessment of what must be done if the devastation wrought on Nagasaki in August 1945 is to remain the final time that a nuclear weapon was used in anger.

One of the greatest challenges of our third nuclear age is the emergence of ‘interlinked multipolar nuclear dynamics’. The balance of terror between two superpowers, and the mutual understanding and eventual co-operation that emerged between them, is being steadily replaced by a world in which China is a major force. North Korea’s nuclear weapons and associated missile programmes have matured to the point where journalists tend to refer to North Korean launches no longer as ‘tests’ but rather as ‘exercises.’ Arch-enemies India and Pakistan also possess nuclear weapons, while the Middle East appears to be on the cusp: Israel remains opaque about its capabilities and it is unclear whether, and when, Iran might make the final dash to acquire a weapon. Saudi Arabia has already made clear that it would quickly follow suit.

Given the complex rivalries and anxieties that exist between these various players, it is more difficult now than ever, argues Panda, to estimate and plan for the repercussions should any one of these countries shift their nuclear posture – or be thought by their competitors to be doing so. That could be a change in their nuclear doctrine – the stated rules governing a country’s use of nuclear weapons – or perhaps the carrying out of new tests or the development of new technologies (hypersonic missiles are not, in themselves, a game-changing threat, suggests Panda, but some states might resort to fresh nuclear tests in the process of developing such tech). Nuclear deterrence depends fundamentally on two things. First, the enemy must be vulnerable to your weapons. Second, you, in turn, must possess a ‘survivable and secure second-strike capability’: if all your nuclear weapons could be destroyed in a first strike by an opponent, then you don’t have a credible deterrent.

This latter aspect of deterrence is becoming more salient as technology advances. An attempt, for example, by a state to develop a missile shield akin to Israel’s iron dome would change the balance of deterrence significantly: by rendering that country less vulnerable to enemies’ nuclear weapons, it would create a disparity that might prompt the other side to take escalatory action. In one of his many illuminating references to the first nuclear age, Panda points out the importance here of the US-USSR Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972. ‘At the core of the treaty was a mutual acceptance of the idea that vulnerability to the other’s retaliatory strike would provide some salve to… arms race incentives.’ Another version of the same challenge is the ‘transparent seas’ problem. If a technological breakthrough suddenly rendered a country’s at-sea nuclear deterrent visible to the enemy, that country’s second-strike capabilities would be badly eroded and might persuade them to increase and diversify their arsenal.

Elsewhere, the link between new technology and fresh nuclear risks seems less clear, in Panda’s estimation. Fans of The Terminator (1984), who recall the war on humankind waged by Skynet, the networked artificial general intelligence, might expect AI to be playing a central and perhaps ominous role in the new nuclear age. In fact, writes Panda, few experts, inside or outside governments, are pressing for the integration of AI into decision-making on the use of nuclear weapons. Simulations suggest that human beings under pressure listen more to the advice of trusted human confidantes than they do to what computers tell them. AI is more likely to be found contributing to the problems of the ‘transparent seas’ type: making the tracking of enemies’ nuclear weapons more feasible, thus risking pre-emptive escalation by those enemies. North Korea often comes up in these scenarios: should Kim Jong-Un discover that South Korean or American technology is successfully tracking his weapons, threatening to take them offline or about to cut him off from controlling them, it is possible that the much-feared ‘use them or lose them’ scenario might play out.

The war in Ukraine illustrates what Panda regards as another potentially perilous scenario in the new nuclear age. Many of us will have encountered for the first time the idea of ‘battlefield’ or ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons in media discussions of Vladimir Putin’s options for the conflict. Given the failure of Russia’s initial invasion and the support of NATO countries for Ukraine, it seemed credible to some analysts that Putin might opt for a limited nuclear strike to move the fighting in his favour and to warn NATO off giving Ukraine any further support.

The danger here would have been two-fold, as Panda sees it. At best, after nearly 80 years of non-use, a fresh nuclear Rubicon would have been crossed. At worst, what began with the use of a single battlefield nuclear weapon might quickly have escalated into a general nuclear exchange between various parties to the Ukraine conflict. Panda notes that the United States may itself, in the future, be tempted to use limited nuclear strikes. The more that its conventional forces are stretched, ranged against Russia in Europe and China in the Pacific, the higher the likelihood of it needing to resort to nuclear weapons – perhaps, as with Putin, on the basis that a single weapon might be enough to persuade the enemy to stand down.

It isn’t all bad news. As Panda points out, an argument can be made that nuclear deterrence has actually worked in Ukraine. It worked for NATO: preventing Russia from striking locations within the borders of its member states that are used to funnel weapons to Ukraine. And it worked for Russia, ensuring that talk, early on in the war, of NATO implementing a no-fly zone over Ukraine came to naught: the risk was simply too great of NATO and Russian forces coming into direct conflict. (It has done little, of course, for the people of Ukraine, whose interests appear to have been sacrificed in the avoidance of wider catastrophe.) The lesson here is somewhat heartening: deterrence can still work – if the political, strategic and technical complexities can be managed.

Having explored the way that politics and technology might share this new nuclear age, Panda takes readers on a world tour of present and future nuclear hotspots. Most of these will be familiar to readers – Iran, the Korean peninsula, South Asia – but Panda’s treatment of them manages to be both balanced and insightful. A particular cause for concern, over the next few years, will be Taiwan. In the past, Panda writes, war games looking at how a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan by force might play out tended either to ignore any nuclear option or to stop at the point where nuclear weapons were used (the ‘game’ was, at that point, well and truly over). Recently, this has been changing. China’s nuclear capabilities are growing rapidly and there are doubts about how much the United States would be prepared to risk in defending Taiwan. Panda quotes a Chinese military official stating things very bluntly to an American interlocutor: ‘You care a lot more about Los Angeles than Taipei.’

Alongside his analysis, Panda has a message to convey, with an important cautionary dimension: ‘Decades of nuclear non-use have bred complacency, overconfidence, and a tendency among far too many thinkers to dismiss the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.’ Added to this are suggestions for how risk in the new nuclear age might be managed, drawing on the lessons of the past. First, arms control. This is doubtless more complex than in the past, because of the number of players and the range of technologies involved, added to problems of trust: it is hard to see Putin or Xi allowing the US verification access to their arsenals (and vice versa). And yet, since this is in part a problem of public image for these leaders, private channels might profitably be developed, suggests Panda.  A second means of managing risk is the possession by all sides of a secure second-strike capability. Third, nuclear states can take into account the anxieties of their enemies – perhaps, writes Panda, by committing to refraining from interference in their nuclear command and control systems. This would render less likely the ‘use them or lose them’ scenario on the Korean peninsula.

As so often in international affairs, one has to hope that somewhere beyond the colourful, often nakedly aggressive rhetoric deployed by political leaders the world over, wise and well-informed people are at work thinking about risk and how to manage it. One of the joys of Panda’s book is that he has access to some of these people, and is able to share with us their thinking. He steers clear of making predictions, but towards the end of the book he does share with us what some analysts regard as being a possible future scenario. Might our generation, they wonder, one day face a ‘modern Cuban Missile Crisis’ – and might it be what saves us? Having stood together on the precipice and taken a good look down, we may recall with fresh feeling and resolve the Reagan-Gorbachev statement from back in 1985: ‘A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’