The Third Nuclear Age: Complexity, Contestation, and the Evolution of Global Order

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. Eighty years after the first nuclear weapons were exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world has moved into a new, more dangerous, contested, and complex era.We can think of this as a Third Nuclear Age^-^fundamentally different from the Cold War and post-Cold War worlds that preceded it. A combination of rapid technological change in weapons systems and the nuclear information space that will impact deterrence, escalation, and proliferation; a move towards a more fragmented, multipolar world, and perhaps the end of the liberal international order; a breakdown in arms control and the sense of shared nuclear responsibility and restraint; and increased appetite for nuclear technologies to meet climate, developmental, and scientific demands,