By The Diplomat | Created at 2026-08-04 18:10:54 | Updated at 2026-08-05 19:35:56
2 days ago
In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy warned that in the 1970s the world might have up to 25 nuclear weapon states. He was making the case for an international agreement to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. That agreement, the NPT, proved to be perhaps the most significant arms control agreement ever negotiated.
Today we stand at a similar juncture. Left unattended the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation is significant and growing; nowhere more so than in the Indo-Pacific.
The NPT succeeded because it convinced countries contemplating acquiring nuclear weapons that proliferation was ultimately destabilizing. It rested on a series of incentives such as access to nuclear power for peaceful purposes; an international safeguards regime, which engendered confidence that nuclear material was not diverted from peaceful to military purposes; and the pledge that ultimately the five nuclear weapon states recognized by the treaty would engage in comprehensive disarmament. Not every element of this compact was delivered but enough was to convince most countries not to consider crossing the nuclear threshold.
Those assumptions are now being revisited. Countries such as South Korea and Poland talk openly about acquiring nuclear weapons. Others are revisiting whether it is an option they should keep open. Even in Australia, a leading advocate for non-proliferation, some 39 percent of Australians support acquiring nuclear weapons, according to the latest Lowy Institute poll. The dominoes are upright for now, but if one falls others will surely follow.
At the heart of the proliferation challenge are shifting perceptions of how to buttress security in a world facing a bonfire of certainties.
What we are seeing in the Indo-Pacific is a double hedging strategy. Regional states want to hedge against China’s hegemonic ambitions. But they also want to hedge against U.S. unreliability, which has been President Donald Trump’s legacy to Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.
This has significant implications for extended nuclear deterrence, one of the supporting pillars of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. If the United States is perceived as an unreliable partner, how credible is extended nuclear deterrence? Can we really believe, for example, the U.S. would sacrifice San Francisco to save Sydney?
The end of the post-war international order is leading more countries to invest in deterrent capabilities and to pursue a larger measure of strategic autonomy. These are seen as buffers against strategic instability and an overreliance on the U.S. cavalry coming to the assistance of its allies and partners.
For some the logic of both deterrence and strategic autonomy ends with nuclear weapons, increasingly seen as both the ultimate deterrent and the ultimate protector of autonomy. Nuclear arms are the reason, some argue, why North Korea (which withdrew from the NPT) has not been attacked while NPT member Iran has; why Ukraine would have been better off if it had retained Soviet era nuclear weapons.
These assumptions may be questionable, even simplistic, but they are gaining more traction. They cannot be ignored.
If we want to prevent the superficially appealing from becoming compelling, we need a more open discussion about both the strategic anxieties behind an interest in nuclear weapons and the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation. It is a discussion that may require a vocabulary quite different to the grammar of the NPT and the routine stalemate of successive NPT Review conferences.
How best to structure such a dialogue? Track II engagement can be useful, but these are issues that need to be addressed at the government level and in a multilateral context.
In the Indo-Pacific the weakening of regional institutions does not help. But could this be a topic on which agreement on a dialogue may be relatively easy to secure in a body such as the East Asia Summit (EAS). The China-U.S. faultline and the U.S. loss of faith in multilateralism has steadily neutered the EAS, as they have other Indo-Pacific regional arrangements. But non-proliferation is an issue that should transcend such divisions.
The United States, China, and Russia may not welcome a discussion on the causes of contemporary strategic anxiety, but none has an interest in the proliferation of nuclear weapons, just as the U.S. and the Soviet Union were on a non-proliferation unity ticket during the Cold War. And even those EAS members who may be flirting with the idea of acquiring nuclear weapons should have no fundamental objection to putting in place a structured dialogue to address the challenges of nuclear weapons proliferation. It commits them only to a deeper understanding of the underlying issues.
Australia – which has been at the center of multilateral diplomacy on nuclear non-proliferation, from the strengthening of IAEA safeguards to the negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, all the NPT Review conferences, and the negotiation of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty – could take a lead in brokering such a dialogue. Even better, it could be a joint initiative of Australia and ASEAN, which would give it real weight.
Such a dialogue, nested in the architecture of the EAS, might critically examine the assumption that acquiring a nuclear weapon strengthens a country’s security. It could examine the huge cost of a nuclear weapons program, as well as the technical complexity. In short, it could serve to demonstrate that the case for nuclear weapons may not be as straightforward as some think. At the very least, such a dialogue may encourage would-be proliferators to recognize that easy answers to complex questions may not be in their long-term security interests.
An EAS dialogue on nuclear non-proliferation may also offer some hope that regional institutions can move beyond life support. It is true that the high point of multilateralism is behind us. But for all the emphasis on sovereignty, self-reliance, and putting national interests first, we are still left with the reality that some issues can only be resolved through multilateral cooperation.
No amount of chest thumping can alter the simple truth that problems without borders do not disappear with the abandonment of multilateralism. They just need to be addressed in a different way. And if they are not, we will all be both poorer and less secure.
This essay was first published in the Asian Peace Programme (APP) web page. The APP is housed in the National University of Singapore (NUS).
