Release of ASPI Strategy Report 'A delicate issue: Asia's nuclear future'

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) today released a new report which explores the issue of nuclear weapons in Asia.

This Strategy, titled ‘A delicate issue: Asia’s nuclear future’, says the world stands on the cusp of a new era in nuclear relations—one in which Asia is likely to become the dominant influence on global nuclear arrangements. The old, bilateral nuclear symmetry of the Cold War is giving way to new multiplayer, asymmetric nuclear relationships.

And it is doing so at a time when power balances are shifting across Asia, when pressures for proliferation are returning to the regional agenda, and when non-state actors are an increasingly worrying part of the Asian nuclear equation.

Report author Rod Lyon judges that, ‘we are headed into a nuclear order of which we have little previous experience.’

The paper argues that Australia’s own policy options will be profoundly shaped by how Asia’s nuclear future unfolds. We can assist with redesigning nuclear order in a cooperative Asia, including by drawing regional countries into a discussion about how stable deterrent relationships can be built across deep power asymmetries. But a darker, more competitive Asian nuclear future—a future characterised by proliferation, growing credibility problems for US extended nuclear deterrence arrangements, or the return of a revisionist great power—would confront Australian policymakers with difficult choices, of hedging rather than ordering.

‘Nuclear latency’—the set of nuclear-related skills, materials and possible weapons systems—will grow in both Asian futures, Dr Lyon said. But it would obviously be more worrying in the darker future: there ‘the gaps between mere latency, actual nuclear hedging, and covert proliferation might well become less distinct.’

The report concludes that Australian strategic policy should retain the flexibility to accommodate a range of possible Asian nuclear futures, striking a balance between its ordering and hedging strategies during a possible turbulent era in regional security.

Rod Lyon is Program Director for the Strategy and International Program.

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