In our latest commentary from our New European Voices on Existential Risk (NEVER) network, Michaela Higgins Sørensen explores and refutes the claim that young people are not interested in the nuclear space and calls for the sector to provide the appropriate support for young people to engage in the world of nuclear disarmament successfully.
Michael Biontino explores how the NPT can be strengthened in advance of its next review cycle. He outlines how, even in these increasingly polarised times, measures such as streamlining procedures and mechanisms, creating adequate institutional support and creating the appropriate governing structures, can all help to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, accountability, coordination, and continuity of the review process of the Treaty.
The deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus would increase nuclear risks and undermine key nonproliferation norms, but it would not alter the strategic balance in Europe. For Russia, sharing nuclear weapons with Belarus might well backfire politically. NATO countries should therefore resist the impulse to up the nuclear ante.
Today the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have announced the Doomsday Clock 2023 and how close we are to midnight. We asked some of our network members what can be done to turn back the clock and avert a man-made global catastrophe.
In contrast to the disappointing outcomes of the non-proliferation and disarmament pillars of the 2022 Review Conference, a significant reinvigoration took place in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy pillar. Olamide Samuel writes that Pillar III offered progressive solutions by identifying how the treaty plays a role in mitigating some of the most pressing human and environmental security issues of our time and could help inform mechanisms for cooperation and success in future RevCons.
In the past, concerns about a nuclear attack were mainly in regard to the leaders of rogue states acquiring nuclear weapons. The war in Ukraine has shifted this threat to the leader of a superpower waging a war with thousands of known nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. Tarja Cronberg explores the ways in which control over nuclear weapons can be taken out of the hands of world leaders, and how to mitigate the risk of a nuclear war triggered by the human error of powerful individuals.