Shifting World Order Threatens to Expand the Nuclear-Arms Club
Wars in Ukraine and Iran, and rising doubts about the reliability of the U.S., are making countries around the world wonder if having their own nukes is the key to survival.
Key Points
- Ukraine’s disarmament is viewed by some as a mistake, while North Korea’s nuclear pursuit is seen as a challenge to security.
- Some U.S. allies consider nuclear weapons due to doubts about American protection, fueled by Trump’s questioning of NATO’s value.
- The contrast between Ukraine’s vulnerability and North Korea’s immunity highlights the debate on nuclear proliferation.
When it came to nuclear weapons, the U.S. had two top priorities in the 1990s. One was to ensure that newly independent Ukraine handed over its vast arsenal to Russia. The other was to prevent North Korea from obtaining its own nukes.
The first effort was a success, but today, many regard Ukraine’s disarmament as a strategic blunder, leaving it vulnerable to a Russian invasion that has triggered the bloodiest European war in generations. The second attempt was a failure: Pyongyang deftly exploited American reluctance to use military force and became a nuclear-armed state that can challenge global security.
Now, as Israel unleashes its military seeking to prevent what it says could be a similar nuclear breakthrough by Iran, these examples are being carefully studied around the world. Is the lesson that countries facing existential threats need nuclear weapons to survive? Or that pursuing those weapons is too dangerous, encouraging enemies to strike while they still can?
In the past, it was mostly rogue states like Libya, Syria and Iraq that tried to obtain nukes. Today the option is being seriously contemplated by American allies such as South Korea, Japan, Poland, Germany and Turkey, who worry that they can no longer rely on Washington’s protection. President Trump has fueled this existential dread by questioning the value of NATO, cutting off military aid to Ukraine and considering a pullback of American forces from South Korea.
Meanwhile, North Korea emerged from isolation to join a formal military alliance with Russia, sending troops to fight on European soil and testing its ballistic missiles on Ukrainian cities. It could do so with impunity because, unlike Tehran’s theocracy, Pyongyang’s totalitarian regime has a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons and doesn’t fear being challenged with military force.
“A lot of countries will now be thinking that nuclear weapons are the ticket to sovereignty,” said Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who served as special envoy for Ukraine in the first Trump administration. “If we don’t change our behavior—and I don’t expect we will—the world we’re going to live in 20 years from now will be a world with lots of nuclear-weapons states.”
A Ruthless New World
Nuclear-weapons technology is some 80 years old, and it’s within reach of any determined industrialized nation. Yet the nuclear club has remained small. The five nuclear powers recognized by the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—the U.S., Russia, China, France and the U.K.—are all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The other four nuclear powers don’t belong to the NPT. India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998; North Korea tested its first bomb in 2006. Israel, whose program drew on French assistance in the 1960s, is believed to have at least 90 warheads, but maintains a formal policy of ambiguity about its nuclear status.
The U.S. has long encouraged allied nations to rely on the American nuclear umbrella for protection rather than building their own arsenals. Despite all the fears sparked by the Trump administration, American officials insist that security commitments to allies remain ironclad. “We’re not going anywhere,” said Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, at a conference in Brussels this month. “The United States cannot go alone into this very dangerous world, and so we need our allies. But we need allies that are capable, that are strong as well, and that can join the fight if a fight breaks out.”
Yet those promises sound less convincing in a ruthless global environment where interlocking conflicts continue to expand. “The international order, which we knew for 80 years after World War II, has fallen apart. That international order created a certain predictable environment, including nonproliferation treaties on so many types of weapons,” said Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský. “Clearly, we now see a discussion on nuclear weapons—and Vladimir Putin is to blame for that because he opened this Pandora’s box. He’s challenging borders and so, logically, others are asking: how can we now protect our own borders?”
To France, the decision by President Charles de Gaulle to develop a fully independent nuclear capability in the 1960s, instead of relying on American promises, looks like a stroke of historic genius today. That decision went against American wishes at the time, noted French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu. “We have always believed that we cannot delegate our security to others,” he said.
Yet Lecornu noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also shown that nuclear weapons are no substitute for conventional military strength. “Nuclear deterrence doesn’t solve all your problems. Even though it is a nuclear power, Russia hasn’t been able to succeed in its conventional military operations in Ukraine where, three years later, the once great Russian army is stalled and has yet to conquer four oblasts,” or regions, he said. “This must be food for thought for our South Korean and Japanese friends when it comes to North Korea.”
Ukraine’s Choice
The contrast between Ukraine’s vulnerability and North Korea’s immunity looms large in the deliberations of governments worldwide. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia swiftly removed tactical nuclear weapons from Ukrainian soil. But Kyiv retained sole physical custody over some 1,800 strategic warheads, the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, as well as a fleet of strategic bombers and intercontinental missiles. Ukraine did not have the ability to launch these weapons independently, but officials familiar with the program say the country, where a large part of the Soviet Union’s military industries were located, had enough technical expertise to rewire the warheads and gain full control if it wanted.
“It shouldn’t surprise anybody that the United States wanted to eliminate those weapons, because they were designed, built and deployed to incinerate American cities,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Kyiv. Faced with economic collapse and fierce American pressure, Ukraine agreed to transfer its nuclear arsenal to Russia in accordance with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. In exchange, the U.S., Russia and the U.K. gave “security assurances” to respect Ukraine’s independence and existing borders, commitments that ultimately turned out to be worthless.
A refusal would have put Ukraine on a very different geopolitical trajectory, Pifer noted: “If Ukraine had tried to keep nuclear weapons, it would not have been as ostracized as North Korea. But Ukraine would have had no relationship with NATO and the European Union, and Ukraine might have found out that if did get to a crisis point with Russia, it was having no support from the West.”
Former President Clinton, in an Irish TV interview in 2023, said he felt “terrible” about having forced Kyiv to give up nukes, suggesting Russia wouldn’t have invaded otherwise.
Lithuania’s Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė agreed, saying the West’s reluctance to help Ukraine after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, which violated the Budapest Memorandum, shows that Kyiv should not have given up its arsenal.
“The message that this sends to other countries is: if you have weapons, don’t abandon them, if you have the ability to produce weapons, produce them. Weapons of all kinds,” she said. “As you see, countries that do have a nuclear weapon, somehow they do not get attacked fiercely…Saying let’s disarm, let’s be peaceful pigeons—that’s suicidal. Now we understand.”
Now that Ukraine has lost a fifth of its territory to Russia, and faces Putin’s demands to essentially relinquish sovereignty over the rest, many Ukrainians agree that the country made a mistake in the 1990s. They point out that, after initially imposing sanctions, the U.S. eventually acquiesced to India and Pakistan going nuclear. Ukraine might have followed the same path if it had insisted on keeping its nukes.
Some Ukrainian officials have even hinted that the door to pursuing nuclear weapons could be reopened. Retired Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, Ukraine’s former military chief and current ambassador to London, raised eyebrows in March by saying that Ukraine has become the bulwark of European security even though “for now, it doesn’t possess its own nuclear weapons.” The Ukrainian government says it’s committed to the NPT.
While North Korea pursued a secret nuclear-weapons program primarily based on producing plutonium, Iran—which is a member of the NPT—developed an ostensibly civilian nuclear-energy program based on enriching uranium. Israel and the U.S. say that was a cover for its nuclear-weapons ambitions, and the program has cost Iran an estimated $1 trillion, between direct spending and the impact of sanctions. Yet it has turned out to be worse than useless in preventing the current Israeli onslaught.
“Instead of being a strategic asset, the nuclear program has proven a huge strategic liability for the regime,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. “But when the dust of this war settles, there is a danger that the takeaway of Iran’s next leadership will be not that the mistake was to pursue nuclear weapons—they may think that the mistake was not to pursue nuclear weapons more rapidly.”
Iran’s neighbors are watching, too. In Turkey, TV commentators and some nationalist politicians have already called for developing nuclear weapons to deter Israel. “The future of the Middle East will be the rivalry between Israel and Turkey, given the weakening of Iran,” said Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to the U.S. and the UN. “And in a region with a nuclear-armed power that uses military force to the extent that it does, if I were a Turkish strategist, I would consider the hypothesis of going nuclear to face an aggressive Israel.”
The End of Nonproliferation?
For Turkey and other potential nuclear states, any attempt to acquire nukes would incur considerable political and economic costs. Most existing nuclear powers oppose any erosion of their edge, and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have historically used sanctions to punish violations of the NPT. But that international consensus is dwindling. Russia’s commitment to nonproliferation is particularly in doubt given its close ties to North Korea and Iran, including the transfer of technologies that could have nuclear applications.
“NPT is not dead, but it is now in a crisis mode,” said Ukraine’s former foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin, who was involved in nuclear disarmament talks in the 1990s as a young diplomat. “The NPT is not sustainable when a lot of countries feel that they are not secure delivering on NPT. And if they feel that they are not secure, they will think of something else.”
Nuclear experts say that it could take between two and five years for an industrial nation to gain nuclear capability—if it isn’t stopped by an attack, the way Israel ended Syria’s nuclear program in 2007 and Iraq’s in 1981. North Korea may have similar intentions when it comes to its southern neighbor. “What is happening in Iran is making South Koreans think twice about going nuclear. North Korea would have a strong incentive to prevent that, especially because South Korea has a conventional superiority,” said Lami Kim, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, a Honolulu-based think-tank affiliated with the Pentagon.
Nuclear capability doesn’t come cheap. Obtaining weapons and the means to deliver them, such as missiles, would cost at least several billion dollars, and potentially much more if international sanctions are imposed.
“Everyone wants to be able to fight outside their weight class, which is what being a nuclear power allows,” said Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Yet many countries that considered going nuclear in the past “stepped back and said, we just simply can’t afford to do that because we would have to put all those other things aside, despite our desire.”
The U.S. and other existing nuclear powers long argued against proliferation on the grounds that a planet with dozens of nuclear-armed states would be inherently much more unstable, even threatening the survival of humanity as a whole. When India and Pakistan clashed in May following a terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir, “You had a world on edge in a way that would not have otherwise been because they were two nuclear powers that were in direct conflict directly next to one another,” noted Mast.
Yet some argue that the clash ended quickly, and didn’t turn into a full-scale war, precisely because both sides could exercise nuclear deterrence. That’s a lesson for South Korea, which sees its strategic position increasingly endangered by the growth of North Korean military strength.
The expanding range of North Korea’s missiles and the potency of its nuclear arsenal mean that it now has the ability to threaten the U.S. mainland, which could deter future U.S. military action to protect South Korea. That leaves South Korea facing the same dilemma that prompted France to go nuclear, after de Gaulle asked President John F. Kennedy whether the U.S. would risk having New York City destroyed to protect Paris—and failed to obtain a clear-cut answer.
Opinion polls now show that a majority of South Koreans view American promises of security as insufficient, and some three-quarters want the country to acquire its own nuclear weapons. Support for nukes now “is in the middle of the mainstream,” said Eric Ballbach, an expert on Korea at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, noting that backing for a nuclear option has expanded beyond its traditional conservative base to parts of the center-left led by newly elected President Lee Jae-myung.
“Trump is certainly not going to take nuclear risks for allies, that’s just painfully obvious,” said Robert E. Kelly, a professor at Pusan National University in South Korea. He has authored several papers arguing that Seoul should develop an independent nuclear deterrent.
“Nobody believes that South Korea is going to launch a nuclear weapon out of the blue, nobody thinks that if Poland builds a nuclear weapon, they’re going to drop it on Moscow,” Kelly said. “These are democracies, and if they build a nuclear weapon, that’s OK. It’s only the American hubris that convinces us that we are the only ones responsible enough to manage these weapons.”
