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Nuclear Weapons in 2122: Disaster, Stability, or Disarmament?

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The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century

Abstract

Writing from a Swiss Alps monastery, we reconstruct how our world was turned into a radioactive ruin and consider whether some alternative was possible that might have avoided the nuclear war that devastated our planet. Drawing on the twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship on nuclear weapons, and the idea known as the “multiverse,” we seek to explain why the nuclear war happened and ask what other outcomes were possible. We present three scenarios that are based on different combinations of technological and political developments that would have been feasible starting from 100 years ago. Scenario A corresponds to the current situation and outlines the origins of the nuclear war that largely destroyed human civilization. Scenario B presents an alternative that might have resulted in stability despite a modest expansion in the number of states with nuclear weapons. Scenario C discusses a path that might have led to the abolition of nuclear weapons. In each scenario, we use theoretically informed lenses to explain the conditions and triggering events that could have led to these alternative earth histories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our setting is remarkably similar to that in Miller Jr., 1979. The monastic library contained a copy of that book, with handwritten notes left there by a certain Steven Pifer that made us aware of the uncanny parallelism between our circumstances and those described in a best-selling work of twentieth century post-apocalyptic science fiction.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, Siegel and “Starts with A Bang”, 2019; Howell (2018).

  3. 3.

    Some literature made a distinction between horizontal proliferation, referring to the spread of the bomb to new countries, and vertical proliferation, referring to arms buildups among countries that already had a nuclear arsenal. Most scholarly studies that focused on proliferation used the term in the former sense, while so-called vertical proliferation was more typically described as an arms race and addressed in the literature on nuclear deterrence. For an overview, see the Journal of Conflict Resolution “Special Issue: Nuclear Posture, Nonproliferation Policy, and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons” (Gartzke and Kroenig 2013).

  4. 4.

    York (1970).

  5. 5.

    Jo and Gartzke (2007) and Singh and Way (2004).

  6. 6.

    Fuhrmann (2012) and Kroenig (2009a, b).

  7. 7.

    Socolow and Glaser (2009).

  8. 8.

    Volpe (2023) and Whitlark and Mehta (2019).

  9. 9.

    Sagan (1996).

  10. 10.

    Debs and Monteiro (2016).

  11. 11.

    Solingen (2009).

  12. 12.

    Way and Weeks (2015).

  13. 13.

    Braut-Hegghammer (2016), Hymans (2012), and Montgomery (2013).

  14. 14.

    Rublee (2009) and Müller and Schmidt (2010).

  15. 15.

    Hymans (2006).

  16. 16.

    Kaplow (Ψ 2023).

  17. 17.

    Gartzke and San (Ψ 2025).

  18. 18.

    Harrington and Knopf (2019).

  19. 19.

    For a critique of this interpretation, see Knopf (2022).

  20. 20.

    Rabinowitz (Ψ 2027).

  21. 21.

    Abubakar et al. (Ψ 2031).

  22. 22.

    Schelling (1958).

  23. 23.

    Kahn (1960).

  24. 24.

    Wilson (2013).

  25. 25.

    Cunningham (Ψ 2023) and Johnson (2020).

  26. 26.

    Lewis and Sagan (Ψ 2026).

  27. 27.

    Narang (Ψ 2030).

  28. 28.

    Schneider et al. (Ψ 2023).

  29. 29.

    Wunderlich (Ψ 2028).

  30. 30.

    Ritchie (2019).

  31. 31.

    Davis Gibbons (2018), Sauer (Ψ 2023), and Ritchie (Ψ 2025).

  32. 32.

    For an analysis of “sprinting” strategy of nuclear acquisition, see Narang (2017). On Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the prior work on nuclear weapons, see Arnold et al. (2019).

  33. 33.

    Sagan et al. (2007), Miller and Volpe (2018), and Fitzpatrick (2015).

  34. 34.

    Knopf (2013).

  35. 35.

    Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2021.

  36. 36.

    Zwald (2013).

  37. 37.

    See Lewis (2018), for a fictional account of how a North Korean nuclear strike on the United States could have come about.

  38. 38.

    Holloway (1994).

  39. 39.

    For a proposal to do this, see Lowther and McGiffin (2019).

  40. 40.

    Builds on Mills et al. (2014).

  41. 41.

    For a paradigmatic treatment of this issue, see Sagan and Waltz (2003).

  42. 42.

    Narang (2014).

  43. 43.

    Gartzke and Lindsay (2019) and Futter (2018).

  44. 44.

    Waltz (1981).

  45. 45.

    Lewis et al. (2014), Pelopidas (2017), Pelopidas (Ψ 2025), Stein and Lotan (2019).

  46. 46.

    Sagan (1995) and Sherwin (2020).

  47. 47.

    Lieber and Press (2017).

  48. 48.

    Lin-Greenberg (Ψ 2026).

  49. 49.

    Snyder (1961).

  50. 50.

    Gerson (2010).

  51. 51.

    Lavoy (2009).

  52. 52.

    Williams and Drew (2020).

  53. 53.

    Jervis (1989) and Lebow and Stein (1995). The views of proliferation optimists and pessimists were brought into explicit debate in Sagan and Waltz (2003).

  54. 54.

    Knopf (2012), Cohen (2017), and Dupuy (2009).

  55. 55.

    Miller (2018).

  56. 56.

    We discuss this conflict more in depth in Scenario C.

  57. 57.

    Kmentt (2021).

  58. 58.

    See, for example Kroenig (2018), Sechser and Fuhrmann (2017), and Debs (2022).

  59. 59.

    Van Horn and Wang (Ψ 2032).

  60. 60.

    Paul (2009).

  61. 61.

    Tannenwald (2002).

  62. 62.

    Sagan and Weiner (2021).

  63. 63.

    Perkovich and Acton (2009).

  64. 64.

    Evangelista et al. (Ψ 2027).

  65. 65.

    See a similar assessment in Schlapak and Johnson (2016).

  66. 66.

    This scenario builds on the mix of Scenario 1 and 2 in Kühn (2018) and elements from multiple case descriptions from Lewis et al. (2014).

  67. 67.

    See Kemp et al. (2016) and Hecla and Danagoulian (2018).

  68. 68.

    For similar proposals, see Jason (2014) and Mian et al. (2017).

  69. 69.

    Tertrais (2019).

  70. 70.

    For more on the institutional arrangements that would support a world without nuclear weapons, see Müller (2020).

  71. 71.

    Onderco (2021).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Michal Onderco

  2. Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS), Monterey, CA, USA

    Jeffrey W. Knopf

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  1. Michal Onderco
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Correspondence to Michal Onderco .

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  1. Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

    Laura Horn

  2. Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Ayşem Mert

  3. Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Franziska Müller

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Onderco, M., Knopf, J.W. (2023). Nuclear Weapons in 2122: Disaster, Stability, or Disarmament?. In: Horn, L., Mert, A., Müller, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13722-8_7

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