TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsNuclear deterrence is no longer enough
The notion of a clear nuclear threshold no longer corresponds to reality. What exists is a zone of uncertainty: an intermediate space in which hostile acts can accumulate without automatically triggering nuclear escalation.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Antinuclear activist rally outside the United States Mission in front of the United Nations to mark the second anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in New York, the US, on Jan. 20, 2023. (AFP/Kena Betancur)
N
uclear weapons made wars of conquest between great powers unthinkable. After 1945, nuclear powers could still confront one another, but only indirectly, through proxy conflicts and peripheral crises. However bloody, these conflicts were not expected to approach the violence of the 20th century’s two world wars.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine shattered that certainty. By ordering an attack on a country whose independence and security Russia had guaranteed under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, President Vladimir Putin undermined a foundational assumption of the postwar order. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that under the cover of its nuclear arsenal, a major power can wage a full-scale conventional war of conquest without triggering nuclear escalation or crossing the line that was once thought to separate limited war from catastrophe.
The notion of a clear nuclear threshold, therefore, no longer corresponds to reality. What exists instead is a zone of uncertainty: an intermediate space in which hostile acts can accumulate without automatically triggering nuclear escalation.
Deterrence, however, depends less on weapons themselves than on stable expectations regarding their use. Once that stability erodes, rival powers begin to test the limits of what is possible, and the threshold of the intolerable rises.
This shift, in turn, creates opportunities for revisionist powers to reshape the rules of the international system to their advantage, including by force. The inviolability of borders, a cornerstone of the United Nations order, begins to look less like a rule than a conditional norm, valid only when someone is still willing and able to enforce it.
Notably, the most significant strategic ruptures of the past five years have come from nuclear powers themselves. Russia attempted to subjugate Ukraine, then annexed several of the country’s provinces before settling into a war of attrition. Israel, an undeclared nuclear power, responded to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack with military operations of unprecedented scope, striking targets in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
Far from remaining the guarantor of the system it helped build, the United States has fueled its destruction. President Donald Trump’s barely veiled threats to take over Greenland were one sign of that shift. Then came the intervention in Venezuela and abduction of its president, followed by the war with Iran, launched without a UN mandate or meaningful congressional consultation.
