The Russian attack on Ukraine put the nuclear order to the test. In February 2022, the world watched in horror as Russia attacked Ukraine. The West could not intervene because Russia threatened to use nuclear weapons against any intervention. In their article for the Bullletin of Atomic Scientists, Franziska Stärk and Dr Ulrich Kühn argue that nuclear weapons are a costly legacy of past generations that thwart efforts to achieve justice and sustainability. While there have been no wars between nuclear-weapon states, history offers a plethora of proxy wars. The existing nuclear order favors nuclear-weapon states while structurally disadvantaging non-nuclear-weapon states. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, however, is not the solution to the problem, they argue. Rather, the concept of nuclear injustice could be used as a conceptual framework for making sharper scientific arguments for nuclear disarmament.
You can find the bulletin here.
Keywords: Ukraine war, Russia, NATO, nuclear armament, nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon states, P5, disarmament, arms control