The past year has transformed the nuclear debate: The last US-Russia arms-control treaty expired, Trump ordered nuclear testing to resume and China is rapidly expanding its capabilities. At the same time, countries that had never publicly contemplated going nuclear are now openly discussing it.
On Aug. 6 this year, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi stood before tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park. At 8:15 a.m., the Peace Bell rang and the crowd observed a minute of silence at the precise time when, 81 years earlier, the city was illuminated by a flash that changed history. Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui repeated the appeal made each year at the ceremony, urging world leaders to stop treating nuclear deterrence as a "realistic approach." This time, however, his words may also have been directed at the leader standing beside him.
About eight months earlier, Japanese media reported something that would have been difficult to imagine in previous years. A senior official in the Prime Minister's Office who advises Takaichi on security told reporters that Japan should begin discussing whether to acquire nuclear weapons. He stressed that this was his personal view, citing Japan's deteriorating security environment and doubts about the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent.
Neither of these developments is unique to Japan. The world order that has shaped our lives at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and perhaps since the end of World War II, is unraveling everywhere.
"After the Cold War, under US leadership but with its allies as well, a new international order was established, based on international institutions, laws, rules and legal frameworks. That order is collapsing before our eyes," said Dr. Or Rabinowitz, a senior researcher at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
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