Andrew Futter writes on the Third Nuclear Age in Southeast Asia

Nuclear weapons have returned to the centre stage of global politics. The modernisation and in some cases expansion of nuclear stockpiles, rapid technological change in weapons technologies and support systems, a loosening of rhetorical and military restraint, crises involving nuclear-armed states, the return of great power nuclear competition, and the erosion and breakdown of international normative and legal frameworks, all point to an increasingly dangerous, unpredictable and different nuclear world. At the same time, the majority of UN member states have resisted this return of nuclear weapons politics by claiming agency in shaping the nuclear normative order, and by directly challenging the continued possession of nuclear weapons for deterrence. 

Concurrently, there is growing interest across the developing world in accessing the possible benefits of nuclear technologies to provide carbon-free energy for their rapidly growing economies. Taken together, these dynamics and sometimes antagonistic nuclear worldviews are increasingly being seen as representing a new era in our nuclear history, and perhaps the beginning of a “Third Nuclear Age”.