Working Papers

Europe’s rapidly shifting security landscape has prompted a reevaluation of nuclear sharing policies, extending beyond those among NATO allies to include new dynamics between Russia and Belarus. This report analyzes the various forms that nuclear sharing policies and debates take through evaluating cases across seven countries.

The end of explosive nuclear weapons testing is one of the key non-proliferation breakthroughs of the past 30 years. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is the only state known to have conducted nuclear testing since the Indian and Pakistani tests in 1998 and it has not done so since 2017. However, in light of the growing salience of nuclear weapons and a crumbling nuclear arms control architecture, concerns over a resumption of explosive nuclear testing have been on the rise.

Despite the reduction in global nuclear arsenals, the existence of nuclear weapons continues to pose a significant global threat and challenge to non-proliferation efforts. While short-term prospects for arms control are limited, this paper outlines the fundamental challenges of addressing all types of nuclear weapons and involving additional nuclear-armed states in future initiatives.

Both transparency, the provision of detailed, accurate, and verifiable information about arsenals and strategies, and ambiguity, the intentional obfuscation of such information to keep others guessing, play roles in deterrence strategies for pretty much all states, nuclear-capable or not. States also practice transparency because of various international obligations.

Missile defense capabilities and offensive arsenals are inextricably linked together. Limits on missile defense have long been at the center of demands from Russia and China. The United States and NATO have expressed particular interest in limits on Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons. Some form of compromise between the two will likely be at the core of a broader package of strategic stability measures.