What Should Be Done?

Practical Policies to Prevent
Nuclear Catastrophe
March 2024
Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons
Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA) Project© 2024 Van JacksonThis report is published under a 4.0 International Creative Commons License.

The research described in this paper was co-sponsored by the Research Center for Nuclear
Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University (RECNA), the Nautilus Institute for Security andSustainability, and the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation andDisarmament (APLN), with collaboration from the Panel on Peace and Security of Northeast Asia
(PSNA). MacArthur Foundation and New Land Foundation funding to Nautilus Institute supported
this project.
The views represented herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views ofaffiliated institution(s), nor that of APLN, its staff, board, or funders.
Please direct inquiries to:
Asia-Pacific Leadership Network
APLN Secretariat
4th floor, 116, Pirundae-ro
Jongno-gu, Seoul, ROK, 03035
Tel. +82-2-2135-2170
Fax. +82-70-4015-0708
Email. apln@apln.network
The full report can be accessed athttps://www.apln.network/projects/nuclear-weapon-use-risk-reduction/what-should-be-donepractical-policies-to-prevent-nuclear-catastrophe

Cover Photo: Byungdug Jun, Image processing of aerial photographs taken by the U.S. military
before and after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki (Part 1), Journal of the Japan Society for Digital
Archive, Vol.6, No.s3, pp.s238-s241, 2022
https://doi.org/10.24506/jsda.6.s3_s238

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe2Dr. Van Jackson
Dr. Van Jackson is a scholar of international relations
specializing in East Asian and Pacific security, critical analysis
of defense issues, and US foreign policy. He is a Senior Lecturer
in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington
and a Senior Research Adviser at APLN. Van is also a SeniorResearch Scholar at Security in Context, where he co-directs
the “Multipolarity, Great-Power Competition, and the Global
South” project, as well as a Senior Non-Resident Fellow
at the Center for International Policy in Washington and aDistinguished Fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.
Van is the author of several books, including Pacific Power
Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace(Yale University Press, 2023). He has appeared widely in the
media, including on The Majority Report with Sam Seder,
HBO’s Vice News Tonight, CNN, BBC Radio, and Planet
America. His writing has been featured in Foreign Affairs,
Dissent, The Nation, New York Times, Washington Post, and
The Atlantic, among others.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe3What Should Be Done?

Practical Policies to Prevent
Nuclear Catastrophe
Dr. Van Jackson

OBJECTIVES AND INTRODUCTION
Dangers are compounding. There is a sense that is as palpable in the public mind as it is amongexperts that the risks of nuclear conflict are growing.1 Discrete events inform this fear.
In 2017 and early 2018, the world came closer to nuclear war (between the United States and North
Korea) than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.2 In 2020, the military forces of two nuclear
powers (China and India) clashed in the Himalayas. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine defied
international law, global opinion, and even the rational limits of military conquest; it has also led toboth Washington and Moscow wielding veiled nuclear threats anew. In October 2023, Hamas’s
attacks on Israel triggered a relentless reprisal against Gaza so brutal that it did not even spare
women and children. Reputable organizations and politicians now charge Israel—a state whose
nuclear weapons the world politely ignores—with war crimes, and the government of South Africa
has brought a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide.3
These headline events take place in the context of deteriorating structural forces. Long-crucial
sources of stability (regionalism, economic interdependence, arms control and disarmament
regimes) have come under duress in recent years, in tandem with the resurgence of traditionalsources of conflict (great-power rivalry, ethnonationalism, and sphere-of-influence geopolitics).

1 Jon Letman, “Are Nuclear-Armed Nations Entering a New Arms Race in 2024? Experts Weigh In,” Truthout (January
21, 2024), https://truthout.org/articles/are-nuclear-armed-nations-entering-a-new-arms-race-in-2024-experts-weighin/#:~:text=On%20the%20question%20of%20whether,interested%20in%20significantly%20increasing%20their
2 Van Jackson, On the Brink: Trump, Kim and the Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
3 Tim Cocks, “South Africa’s Genocide Case is a Diplomatic Win, After ‘Damning’ Verdict,” Reuters (January 27, 2024),
https://www.reuters.com/world/south-africas-genocide-case-is-diplomatic-win-whatever-verdict-2024-01-26/#:~:text=The%20
International%20Court%20of%20Justice,the%20ceasefire%20South%20Africa%20demanded

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

4The shadow of nuclear war hangs most acutely over Northeast Asia4 —the only place where nuclear
weapons have been used in an attack.5 In addition, four nations active in Northeast Asia possess
nuclear weapons (China, North Korea, Russia and the United States), the prospect of further
nuclear proliferation among US allies is a very real threat, and entrenched military commitments
collide with unresolved historical conflicts. Northeast Asia is the only region where, for decades, theinherent precariousness of nuclear deterrence has been a persistent background feature of both
policymaking and everyday life.
But the demand, “Let Nagasaki be the last!”—a reference to the second of two sites that the US
attacked with nuclear weapons in 1945—is also growing louder. The belief that nuclear wars cannot
be won and must therefore never be fought is widespread, endorsed by world leaders, awardwinning scientists, the UN Secretary-General, and the 93 signatories to the Treaty on the Prohibitionof Nuclear Weapons.
The question is how best to make good on this global belief. What must be done to ensure that
Nagasaki is the last?

PROJECT OBJECTIVES AND BACKGROUND
The overall aim of the “Reducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia” project isto minimize the risk of nuclear weapons use in the region by developing better understandings ofthe processes that could lead to their first use and the potential outcomes of such use. Improved
understandings of the potential paths to and impacts of the use of nuclear weapons have been aprincipal means by which we came to develop policy ideas designed to reduce the risks of nuclear
weapons detonation. We seek to prevent any use of nuclear weapons in the region and ultimately to
avoid armed aggression or war.
To understand the risk of nuclear weapons use and to develop policies to lower that risk, theReducing the Risk of Nuclear Weapons Use in Northeast Asia (NU-NEA) project has been guided by
the following questions:
1.

Under what conditions might nuclear weapons be used (with or without intention) in
Northeast Asia (NEA) and by whom? How might such first use of nuclear weapons escalate
to a larger scale of nuclear war? And which states might respond to a first nuclear use with
nuclear weapons use of their own?

4 “Northeast Asia” in this report refers to Japan, China, North Korea, and South Korea, as well as the United States as asignificant extra-regional actor with allies in the region. To create a set of pragmatic policy recommendations at this time,
given the complications posed by Russia’s war with Ukraine, we have limited the scope of this report to these five countries.
We hope to explore Russia’s role in regional nuclear risk reduction in a future report.
5 We acknowledge and cannot ignore that hundreds of nuclear tests in the Pacific caused immense harm and constitutea form of violence, even if apart from war. On the nuclear legacy still haunting the Pacific, see APLN’s Voices From PacificIsland Countries project, https://www.apln.network/projects/voices-from-pacific-island-countries

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

52. What are the possible consequences (fatalities, physical damages to key infrastructure,environmental damages, climate impacts, and more) of potential nuclear weapon use in
Northeast Asia?
3. What are the possible measures to reduce the possibility of use of nuclear weapons in
the region? That is, what lessons do analyses of use cases offer for the development anddeployment of policies that will help to avoid nuclear weapons use?
This report represents the culmination of a three-year project that aimed to answer these questions.
The first year focused on use cases and pathways to nuclear use (the how and the why) in NEA,
stressing especially the Korean peninsula but also including potentialities involving nuclear use by
Russia, China, and the United States. The second year focused on the impacts and consequencesof nuclear use, evaluating in great detail the five use cases that best represented the fullest range ofplausible nuclear use scenarios facing NEA. This third-year report proposes what ought to be done
and by whom if the world is to avoid the kinds of nuclear violence imagined and modeled in the prior
two years.

A SUMMARY OF THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SITUATION IN NORTHEAST ASIA
Northeast Asia is a site of “nuclear precarity.”6
Nuclear war is an outcome that is, by definition, not predictable; even experts cannot assign reliable
probability distributions to its occurrence. And yet, it is helpful and possible to characterize risks, aswell as to understand that risks can compound, making some situations more prone to catastrophe
than others.
The term “nuclear precarity” refers not to a likelihood or probability of nuclear war but rather to theintersectional risks of nuclear war. Specifically, the intersection of situational and structural risk.

6 The concept of nuclear precarity used here was first described in Van Jackson, “Nuclear Precarity: Analyzing the Risks of
Nuclear War in East Asia,” Keynote lecture at Ritsumeikan University, Center for East Asian Peace and Cooperation Studies,
Kyoto, Japan (October 22, 2021), https://www.undiplomaticpodcast.com/episodes/103-Gus1010Y. See also Van Jackson,“Nuclear Precarity and the Russia Crisis,” Duck of Minerva (October 6, 2022), https://www.duckofminerva.com/2022/10/
nuclear-precarity-and-the-russia-crisis.html

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

6Coercive military signaling.
Errors in judgement,
misperception, accident

Structural
Risks of
Nuclear War

NUCLEAR
PRECARITY

Crisis instability(nuclear usepressures)

Situational
Risks of
Nuclear War

High Structural Risks+

High Situational Risks

Arms-racing
instability“Structural risk” refers to impersonal forces that create rational incentives to use nuclear weapons(crisis instability) or escalate an arms competition (arms racing instability). When there are vast
asymmetries in military power between rivals, for example, or when the offense-defense balance
favors the offense, there are rational incentives for decision-makers to either use nuclear weapons
or try to out-arm ones’ opponent even though doing so makes the situation worse because theopponent will reciprocate. Structural risk is relational or system-level risk.
“Situational risk,” by contrast, is actor-centric. It refers to the degree of reliance on coercive military
signaling toward an antagonist. There is always some coercive signaling in a crisis, and between
adversaries there is often some military signaling even when there is not a crisis. But using weapons
platforms, defense posture, or new declaratory policies as a way of communicating threats to an
adversary introduces dangerous possibilities. Because the nature of military signaling is necessarily
crude and imprecise,7 the situational risk of nuclear war is higher when reliance on military signaling isgreater. The more you use it for coercive purposes, the more you introduce opportunities for errors
in judgment, misperceptions, or accidents.
While we can judge structural risks in an abstract or generalized way, situational risks involve
concrete situations/scenarios. These two concepts are important because it is possible to have asituation that is structurally unstable but under control because of actor restraint (that is, little or no

7 The classic work on how vulgar military signaling leads to coercive failure is Wallace Thies, When Governments Collide:
Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964-1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe7military signaling) and clear channels for communication.8 Likewise, it is possible to have a situationthat is fraught with threat-making and military posturing but remains basically under control
because neither side has any incentive to actually go to war or perhaps lacks the realistic ability tosurvive a war.
Northeast Asia is unique for being a region that includes rivalries with both high structural andsituational risk—a condition of nuclear precarity.
STRUCTURAL RISK
Low

High

China-India(2020)
China-US/Taiwan(1996)Low

SITUATIONAL RISK

China-US/Japan(2013-Today)High

US-North
Korea (2017)
Cuban Missile
Crisis (1962)

US-Russia(Today)US-North Korea(2018-2019)

China-US/Japan(Pre-2012)

US-USSR(1980s)NuclearPrecarity

Figure 1. Varieties of Nuclear Stability
An Unstable Conjuncture: Parts of Northeast Asia Trending Toward Nuclear Precarity
While defense spending in Northeast Asia is not out of control compared to prior decades,9 what
defense spending figures miss is that the military modernization projects of all Northeast Asian
powers are growing.Missile technology continues to proliferate across all Northeast Asian powers.
The region’s nuclear-armed belligerents—in particular China, North Korea, and the United States—
are all pursuing nuclear expansion programs in a manner that closely resembles a qualitative arms
race.108 Mark Bell and Julia MacDonald, “How to Think About Nuclear Crises,” Texas National Security Review Vol. 2, no. 2 (2019),
pp. 40-65.
9 SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex
10 Traditional definitions of “arms race” focus excessively narrowly on tabulating the number of a given category of weaponby competitors. But arms-racing dynamics and the dangers they entail can involve a qualitative process of escalating
modernization or doctrinal one-upmanship. On the arms-racing dynamic, see especially Barry Buzan and Eric Herring,
The Arms Dynamic in World Politics (New York: Lynne Reiner, 1998).

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

8These same states are relying more heavily on coercive military signaling toward their rivals(including one another) as time passes. The very branding of our current era as one of “great-powercompetition” gives license to rivals to not only prioritize the threat and use of military force, but toexpress themselves through it.

Structural Risks in Northeast Asia
Northeast Asia is a site of growing conventional missile and nuclear proliferation. Open-source
methods have revealed that China has constructed as many as 300 nuclear silos to houseintercontinental ballistic missiles.11 The outer bound of its existing nuclear arsenal is estimatedbetween 350-500 nuclear warheads from fixed sites and mobile locations (submarines, bombers,
mobile launchers), but the discovery of new silos suggests that, unless politics intervenes, that
number is likely to grow.
There is also a debate in China about whether to abandon its traditional nuclear posture of minimum
deterrence, and whether a policy of no-first use when it comes to nuclear weapons should be
unconditional toward the United States.12 And there is some concern among US officials that China
will pursue a “fractional orbital bombardment system” capability (FOBS), which would involve
launching nuclear warheads into low earth orbit before directing them down to their targets—amaneuver that could enable them to bypass early warning detection systems, thereby increasing
structural risk in the form of US first-use pressures.13
If US officials believe their early warning systems are unreliable against attack, the most aggressive
voices in Washington could urge an American first-strike nuclear posture.
As of this writing, the Biden administration’s response to China’s nuclear expansion has so far
been to rationalize adopting the nuclear policies of the Trump years. Dissatisfied with America’s
large margin of nuclear superiority over China, the Biden administration has picked up where
Trump left off, on a path to $1.7 trillion of nuclear modernization, including investments in low-yield
nuclear warheads, more missile defenses for Northeast Asia, and a plan to buy 145 B-21 stealthbombers—more than six times the size of the current B-2 bomber force. Much of America’s nuclear
enterprise is being justified as a response to threat perceptions regarding China, even though there
are indications that China’s nuclear posture itself is at least partly a response to American nuclear
modernization. On this basis, there are some nuclear specialists in the United States who advocate

11 Ashley Roque, “New Pentagon Report Details China’s Growing Nuclear Arsenal, Possible New Missile Effort,” Breaking
Defense (October 19, 2023), https://breakingdefense.com/2023/10/new-pentagon-report-details-chinas-growing-nucleararsenal-possible-new-missile-effort/
12 “Senior ex-diplomat suggests fine-tuning China’s nuclear weapons policy,” Pekingnology Newsletter (May 10,2021), https://pekingnology.substack.com/p/senior-ex-diplomat-suggests-fine?r=22fwk&utm_campaign=post&utm_
medium=email&utm_source=
13 Sandra Erwin, “Kendall: If China Can’t Beat the US in the Air It Will Try in Space,” Space News (September 20, 2021),
https://spacenews.com/kendall-if-china-cant-beat-the-u-s-in-the-air-it-will-try-in-space/

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

9for a nuclear strategy based on both unlimited nuclear superiority and brinkmanship.14
The Korean peninsula, meanwhile, has become worryingly adrift. North Korea’s nuclear and missilebuildup has continued unchecked, and its military is pursuing new directions that include submarinelaunched ballistic missiles, tactical nuclear warheads, hypersonic glide vehicles, and Pyongyang’s
newly proven ability to launch ballistic missiles from railcars. Unless North Korea has incentives
to restrain its nuclear modernization, future next steps will probably involve developing a multiple
independently-targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV) capability, which helps defeat missile defenses,
and a FOBS capability, to the extent that China also pursues it.
With US support, South Korea has been mounting its own conventional, missile-based response
to North Korea’s nuclear advancements. In May 2021, Washington jointly announced with Seoul
that South Korea no longer had to restrict range and payload capabilities of its indigenous missile
production; a ban that went back 42 years and aimed to curb regional missile proliferation. The Biden
administration has also stood steadfastly by South Korea while it fields its own submarine-launchedballistic missile and, frustrated by the lack of progress in arresting North Korea’s capabilities, renews
calls to develop its own nuclear weapons. Moreover, since the Obama era, the United States has
steadily aided South Korea’s military in bringing to fruition a “kill chain” concept of precision-guided
conventional missiles, advertised as being capable of preemptive and leadership decapitation
strikes.
While Japan arguably exhibits the least structural and situational risk of any Northeast Asian power,
it possesses short-range cruise missiles and ballistic missile defenses that add to the US side in thebalance of forces between the US and China. Within Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party there aredebates about pursuing offense-capable “counter-strike” missiles with a longer standoff range,
and recently two of the candidates for prime minister voiced support for acquiring nuclear-powered
submarines. Japan’s current defense investments now include missiles capable of hitting targets inrival countries.15 If South Korea goes nuclear, moreover, Japan will be faced with a once-in-century
decision about how best to secure itself in a rapidly deteriorating security environment. While
exclusively for civilian use, Japan is the only non-nuclear weapons state that has both uranium
enrichment and reprocessing facilities. It has the largest stockpile of separated plutonium as a
non-nuclear weapon state.

14 For the types of American nuclear thinking, see especially Van Jackson, “Reducing or Exploiting Risk? Varieties of US
Nuclear Thought and Their Implications for Northeast Asia,” Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament Vol. 5, no. 1 (2022),
pp. 185-98.
15 Jindong Yuan, “Japan’s New Military Policies: Origins and Implications,” SIPRI (February 2, 2023), https://www.sipri.org/
commentary/blog/2023/japans-new-military-policies-origins-and-implications

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

10Taken as a totality, these structural risks of nuclear war are greater than any point in the past
generation—and they are on a trajectory to worsen. The Korean peninsula in particular is unusuallyworrying because there is an actual asymmetric arms race happening between a nuclear state and a
non-nuclear state in addition to the more traditional nuclear “balance of terror” between the US andNorth Korea.

Situational Risks in Northeast Asia
Situational risks made the North Korean nuclear crisis in 2017 unusually dangerous, and are also whya crisis in the Taiwan Strait today could be similarly combustible—much more so than the previous
crisis in 1995-1996. Coercive military signaling has become the dominant way that antagonists
communicate in North Korea, as well as an increasingly common way that Beijing communicates toTaipei, and to a lesser extent Tokyo.
Coercive military signaling is not a new phenomenon in the Korean conflict. North Korea has along history of using colorful rhetoric to variously criticize and threaten the United States and its
Northeast Asian neighbors. During the 2017 nuclear crisis, North Korean threats and insults toward
Donald Trump were gratuitous, as were Trump’s responses threatening to “totally destroy” North
Korea. Over the past three years, North Korea has returned to using missile tests as a crude meansof communication with the United States in particular. And it even detonated the Inter-Korean
Liaison Office at Kaesong in June 2020 out of frustration over a lack of diplomatic progress toward
sanctions relief, among other things. All of this shows that North Korea is keeping up its tradition ofrelying heavily on coercive military signaling in its relations with the US and South Korea.
What has heightened situational risk on the Korean peninsula is that the US and South Korea haveincreased their reliance on coercive military signaling to deal with North Korea since 2010. While
North Korea’s threat-making toward the United States in 2017 was consistent with its longstanding
brinkmanship strategy, the novelty of that historical moment was that the United States effectively
chose to mirror-image North Korea. Kim Jong Un’s barbs thrown at Trump’s age, corruption,and mental acuity were commensurate with Trump’s claims against Kim’s weight and struggling
economy. US threats of “fire and fury” combined with aircraft carrier deployments and military
exercises were even more grandiose than the combined missile and nuclear tests carried out under
Kim.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

11The 2017 crisis was so combustible precisely because both sides were defiantly escalating coercive
military signaling against a backdrop of unprecedented first-use and arms-racing pressures. The
United States had a history of restraining its rhetoric and using its military signaling very selectively,
and that norm gave way starting in 2017. The Biden administration is more restrained in its rhetoric
than the Trump presidency, but has shown little care for the risks implied in military signaling throughforce posture changes and military exercises. North Korea’s claimed underwater test of a “nuclearcapable drone” in January 2024, for example, was a direct response to a trilateral military exercise
involving the US, Japan, and South Korea.16 What is more, there is a contingent of nuclear policy
experts in the United States aligned with the Republican Party who increasingly argue that 2017 wasa model—pursuing a brinkmanship signaling strategy in tandem with a structural position of nuclear
superiority.
But greater situational risk owes to South Korean choices too. Under presidents Lee Myung-bak
and Park Geun-hye, South Korea began making direct verbal threats toward North Korea for the firsttime since the end of the Cold War, in addition to seeking very publicly advertised defense reforms
aimed at conducting military operations against North Korea. When President Moon Jae-in came to
power in 2017, he curbed South Korea’s threatening rhetoric toward Pyongyang and implemented
a bilateral Military Agreement in 2018 that helped restore a modicum of stability. But Moon also
continued with the military buildup of his predecessors that openly advertised the ability to launchleadership assassination strikes via a concept it called a “kill chain,” which combined precisionguided cruise missiles and drones with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems fortargeting. Moon’s successor, Yoon Suk-yeol, has overseen the continuation of South Korea’s militarymodernization program while not only reprising but outbidding the military signaling habits of former
presidents Lee and Park.
Yet, the trend of greater military signaling is not limited to the Korean Peninsula. China has embraced
what it dubs “wolf-warrior” diplomacy, which escalates transgressive threat rhetoric toward allantagonists. Since Sino-US relations began deteriorating in 2018, China has become more openly
hostile toward Taiwan, and more openly willing to threaten the use of force. The People’s Liberation
Army Air Force (PLAAF) has steadily increased its incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification
Zone (ADIZ), launching hundreds of air incursions since 2020 and setting a single week record in
2022, when it launched close to 150 fighter aircraft incursions.17 The situation is such that Taiwan’s
defense minister publicly warned that military tensions across the Taiwan Strait are at the worst andmost dangerous level in 40 years.18

16 Brad Lendon and Gawon Bae, “North Korea claims to test underwater nuclear-capable drone after US, South Korea andJapan show off naval might,” CNN (January 19, 2024), https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/19/asia/north-korea-underwater-nucleardrone-test-intl-hnk-ml/index.html#
17 Brian Campbell, “Record Setting Incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone: The People’s Republic ofChina’s Psychological Operations Designed to Erode US Support for Taiwan,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs (2022), p. 155.
18 Ben Blanchard, “Taiwan won’t start a war with China, defence minister says,” Reuters (October 14, 2021), https://www.
reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-defence-minister-says-china-will-have-ability-mount-full-scale-invasion-2021-10-06/

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

12Taiwan’s logical response to the shadow cast by the PLA has been military modernization, including
trying to acquire multiple types of cruise missiles and seeking an indigenous submarine capability.
This pattern across the Taiwan Strait manifests in the East China Sea as well, where wolf-warrior
diplomacy has combined with an escalation of PLA Navy and Air Force incursions into disputed
waters to harass Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Compared to the Taiwan Strait and Korean Peninsula,
the East China Sea is more stable because the rhetoric is less vitriolic and the structural pressuresfor conflict are less intense, but even the East China Sea military signaling has been far greater since2012 than any prior period.
Compounding the military activity of Northeast Asian governments is a US regional posture that is,by the Pentagon’s admission, undergoing a period of “strategic growth,” as well as a heightening
tempo of US deployments and military exercises throughout the region. While it is unclear theextent to which US military signaling activities drive Northeast Asian military signaling or vice versa,
it is clear that because these forces are arrayed against each other in contingency plans, theycollectively function as interlocking antagonisms.

Report Roadmap
The remainder of this report is organized as follows:•

Section 2 details the policy-relevant “lessons” and insights from year one and year two of
this project.

•

Section 3 provides a summary of the policy analysis papers the project commissioned to
explore more deeply the insights from year one and year two.

•

Section 4 presents our policy recommendations for how best to reduce the risks associatedwith nuclear weapons, based on all activity undertaken to date—the use case analysis fromyear one, the impact analysis from year two, and the policy-paper deep-dives from year
three.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

13

SECTION 2: INSIGHTS FROM YEAR ONE AND YEAR TWO
The first year of this project examined 30 use-case scenarios along four dimensions: “Triggering
Events and First Use,” “How the Conflict Evolves,” “Use Case Consequences,” and “Use Case
Uncertainties, Ultimate Outcome, and Policy Lessons.”

Triggering Decision/Event Paths Leading to First Use of Nuclear Weapons(Sampling of DPRK and US First Cases)
DPRK

USA

TRIGGERING EVENTSDPRK
Misperceptionsof US/ROK
Military Intent

ROK/DPRK
War Ignites, US
Fears Defeat

DPRK Economic
Stagnation,
Frustration over
Negotiations

DPRK HEMP
Attack on
Japan, US“Umbrella”
Activated

DPRK
Perception of
ROK/US
Weakness

US President
Believes DPRK
NuclearArsenalVulnerable

FIRST USE OF NUCLEAR EVENTSUNINTENTED USE

Attack on US
and ROK Bases

INTENTED USE

Attacks on
DPRK
Weapons,
Ground Forces

Demonstration
Attack on
Minor ROK
TargetAttacks on
DPRK Weapons
Systems,
Leadership

Attacks on
Yongbyon,
MissileEmplacements

NuclearAttacks on US
Bases in ROK,
Conventional
Across DMZEVOLUTION OF WAR
Uncertainties: Leadership Response, Weapons Effectiveness, International Pressure
Negotiations/Peace Deals

Limited Nuclear Exchange

Reginal Nuclear War

Global Nuclear War

Figure 2. Triggering Events and the Genesis of Nuclear Use Cases

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

14The second year of the project quantitatively modeled and simulated the impact of nuclear use infive of the use-case scenarios from year one:1.

“We’re Still Here” Variant 1, involving nuclear weapons use by the DPRK followed by theUnited States, with 3 total detonations of 10 kt (kiloton) and 8 kt weapons.

2. “US Leadership Hubris,” involving first nuclear weapons use by the United States, followedby use by the DPRK and China, with 18 total detonations ranging in yield from 8 to 300 kt.
3. “Use by Terrorists” Variant 1, with one 10 kt weapon detonated by a terrorist group.
4. “Conflict from Ukraine Spreads East,” involving first nuclear weapons use by Russia andfollowed by the United States, totaling eight detonations of 8, 150, and 200 kt weapons.
5. “Not Going Well in Taiwan,” involving first nuclear weapons use by China followed byresponses from the United States, with a total of 24 detonations ranging in yield from 8 to
300 kt.

Year One Insights
Initial policy-relevant lessons from the year one use cases included the following:•

The need for trusted and reliable open lines of communications between adversaries atmultiple levels.

•

Improve mutual trust and encourage transparency and consistency in describing the extent
and operation of military alliances.

•

Seek to separate the operation of international relations from domestic political concerns asmuch as possible, particularly (but hardly exclusively) in nations where leadership changes
are frequent.

•Seek to insulate the operations of nuclear weapons from the personal or political vagaries ofnational leaders, possibly by strengthening oversight on the use of nuclear weapons.

•

Seek to fully brief leaders, military and otherwise, regarding what is known, what is notknown, and what is possible about the goals, concerns, and emphases of adversaries so
as to allow leaders to better understand and identify (to the extent possible given typically
substantial uncertainties) the ways in which opposing leaders might react in situations ofstress.

•Exercise patience and adjust expectations for results in international negotiations,particularly those involving the DPRK.

•

Equip nuclear weapons systems with redundant command and control mechanisms that
help to assure that a nuclear weapon can never be launched without adequate authority andoversight.

•

Work toward insulating key systems (electric power and communications among them)from high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) bursts, and/or develop robust back-up
arrangements designed to keep those systems running.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

15•Anticipate that potential breakdowns in communication in the nuclear command andcontrol will occur, whether because of, for example, a HEMP detonation or cyberattack, or
because of natural disasters such as earthquakes or severe “solar storms,” and assure thatcommanders in possession/control of nuclear weapons have clear orders as to what to do inthose instances.

•

Encourage all nuclear weapon states to adopt a “No-First Use” declaration policy as a step
toward substantially reducing the risk of nuclear war. The declared nuclear weapons states(NWS) in the region should endorse such policies.

Year Two Insights
Initial policy-relevant lessons from the year one impact analysis included the following:•

A nuclear conflict based on regional issues can escalate to a global nuclear conflict within
hours or days after the first use of nuclear weapons.

•

Any nuclear detonations, even in relatively unpopulated areas, are likely to result in at least
thousands of deaths, with possible fallout crossing international borders, causing additional
health risks and increasing political tensions even when fallout levels are low.

•

Even when focused on military targets, nuclear detonations may kill many hundreds ofthousands of people within days or months, as well as cause hundreds of thousands ofadditional cancer deaths and great economic damage.

•The impact of mass fires or firestorms that sometimes result from nuclear explosions cansurpass the lethality of other direct impacts of nuclear use. Historically, military planning for
nuclear use has lacked sufficient consideration of firestorm impacts.

•

Many of the plausible nuclear use cases developed for this project have their genesis
in misinterpretation of intentions and lack of communication between adversaries,
underscoring the need for communication between nations to avert nuclear weapons use,
especially during times of conflict and crisis.

•

There are many plausible pathways to nuclear war that would have cataclysmic effects. Mostof these pathways involve “slippery slopes” of descent into nuclear war, where an action by
one party is misinterpreted by another, leading to conflict escalation that proceeds further
and more rapidly than adversaries intend or foresee. As such, these potential pathways tonuclear war are often invisible to policymakers.

•

It is urgent to reduce the risk of choosing or stumbling onto one of these pathways
by developing and applying regional and global policy measures such as increasingtransparency of nuclear stockpiles, deployments, and operational and declaratory doctrine—
especially relating to integration of nuclear firestorms into nuclear targeting—and increasing
communications with nuclear hotlines.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe16•In addition, it is important to explore policy measures to reduce the role of nuclear
weapons in security policy and to revive arms control and disarmament diplomacy. Suchmeasures include introducing a nuclear no-first threat norm; resolving regional conflicts;
and, ultimately, establishing a regional security framework, including denuclearization of
the Korean Peninsula and a nuclear weapon free zone in the region, towards elimination of
nuclear weapons altogether.

SECTION 3: SUMMARY OF YEAR THREE POLICY ANALYSES
To support year three’s task of generating actionable policy recommendations, we commissioned
a series of seven papers. Each was undertaken by a relevant subject matter expert, and the topic
was prescribed based on the initial insights from years one and two of the project. We convened
two workshops at which the paper authors presented preliminary research findings to an audienceof East Asian and nuclear policy experts with varying areas of specialization. Authors were thenprovided feedback before submitting final versions, which are undergoing review for eventual
publication on the APLN, Nautilus Institute, and RECNA websites. Most will also be published in the
Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament.
The paper authors, topics, and abstract summaries are as follows:

Adam Mount, “Toward A Nuclear No-First Use Policy”
One way to understand the evolving risks of nuclear escalation in a US-China conflict is through theongoing debate on no-first use. While Beijing has not altered its long-standing policy on no-firstuse, dramatic shifts in its strategic forces raise questions about whether China’s skepticism about
escalation management at the theater level will also change. Though the United States remains
unlikely to adopt a no first use statement, ongoing debates on declaratory policy, nonstrategic
options, and the balance of conventional forces will also affect how US leaders manage escalation ofa limited conflict. This paper explores what it would look like to develop a no-first use nuclear
policy—not just a declaration of no-first use—and what its implications would be for nuclear stability.

Benjamin Zala, “Nuclear-Conventional Entanglement Risks and the New Pressures
on Crisis Management in Northeast Asia”
The dangers associated with the entanglement of nuclear and conventional forces have become
an area of increasing concern. This article surveys the growing nuclear-conventional entanglement
risks in Northeast Asia as well as the ways that entanglement is driving a new era of nuclear arms
racing in response. In order to better manage the risks of nuclear crises occurring, the article
outlines the need for a greater emphasis on assurance policies to match the current focus on making
deterrent threats. Given the high chance of such crisis nevertheless occurring in Northeast Asia inthe years ahead, the article makes the case for developing “crisis management interoperability”
between allies armed with nuclear and strategic non-nuclear weapons. Such interoperability is
aimed at ensuring that the difficult task of crisis signaling is not further complicated by allianceswith entangled nuclear and conventional forces. The global nuclear order is undergoing an importanttransition towards a Third Nuclear Age in which the entanglement of conventional and nuclear forcesis creating new dangers of crisis escalation.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe17

Nuclear-armed states are building up their capabilities and bolstering these with a suite of nonnuclear capabilities with strategic effect.

Ulrich Kuhn and Heather Williams, “Behavioral Arms Control and Northeast Asia”
Growing political and military tensions between China and the United States make it necessary
to devise novel arms control approaches concerning nuclear weapons and certain emerging
technologies. These approaches should be designed to include China and other actors. This
commentary makes the case for a Behavioral Arms Control (BAC) framework between China and theUnited States, which would aid in stabilizing relations in East Asia. It builds on the recent behavioral
turn in arms control and historical examples from the realm of confidence-building measures. It
suggests informal initiatives to reduce military risks by focusing on the actions, rather than thecapabilities, that can lead to escalation. In order to avoid nuclear use and war, BAC prescribes
responsible behavior in multiple military domains, involving various nuclear and non-nuclear actors.
After discussing the BAC concept and ‘responsibility’ in particular, the commentary lays out threeprinciples for engaging China and subsequently proposes several possible arms control initiatives
under a BAC framework.

Rabia Akhtar, “From Crisis to Continuity: The Political Reckoning in a Post-Nuclear
Use Landscape”
Drawing upon insights from the NU-NEA project’s initial years, the paper delves into the politicalramifications of potential nuclear use in the region. It scrutinizes conceivable power shifts, theevolving role of anti-nuclear groups, and the broader impact on security policies. The exploration
extends to scenarios post-nuclear use, encompassing positive, negative, and complex outcomes.
The paper concludes by offering recommendations to policymakers, underscoring the imperative of
substantive dialogues on arms control and conflict resolution to avert catastrophic nuclear events.
Overall, the paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted challenges posed by
nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia and offers valuable insights for crafting a more secure global
environment. Recent developments point towards a disconcerting unraveling of arms control
structures and a growing threat to the nonproliferation regime. The paper underscores the dynamic
evolution of nuclear deterrence, highlighting the strategic use of emerging technologies by states toreshape the balance of vulnerabilities.

Treasa Dunworth, “The Role of International Humanitarian Law in Nuclear
Weapons Use Risk Reduction in North East Asia”
This paper explores the role International Humanitarian Law (IHL) might be able to play in reducing
the risk of the use of nuclear weapons in NEA. It starts by explaining the ways in which IHL has
regulated (and at times, even prohibited) the use of some weapons, tracing developments inthe “Hague Law” from the 19th century, through to the conclusion of the 2017 Treaty on theProhibition of Nuclear Weapons. This reveals how historically, IHL has been dominated by thepolitical and military interests of the Great Powers of the time and how, in many respects, the law
served to protect their military superiority and doctrines from scrutiny. As a direct consequence,contemporary IHL as a body of law suffers from three weaknesses: first, with only a few exceptions,the law relies on general principles to determine the legality of the use of any particular weapon;

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe18second, there remains an incomplete mosaic of outright prohibitions of particular weapons; third,
there remains a lack of fully developed enforcement mechanisms to give force to the substantive
law. The final section of the paper explores ways in which some of the gaps or ambiguities in thesubstantive law could be narrowed and suggests some avenues for achieving better accountability.

Jessica Taylor, “Strategic Communication in Deterrence and Reassurance”
North Korea experts diverge in their analysis surrounding whether Kim Jong Un is preparing for war
in 2024. But where experts agree is that they expect 2024 to see an increase in tensions and activity
on the Korean peninsula surrounding key legislative elections in South Korea and the U.S. presidential
election. With tensions on the rise on the Korean peninsula as North Korea likely continues tochallenge international norms and agreements, the risk of accidental escalation into armed conflictalso rises. This paper addresses pitfalls in the U.S.-East Asia alliance system’s approach to strategic
messaging, which risks inadvertently escalating tensions. The paper then provides avenues tocourse correct these pitfalls.

Lauren Sukin and Woohyeok Seo, “Mitigating the Risks of Extended Deterrence in
East Asia”
Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing security environment in East Asia, regional actors haveseen a surge in “nuclear anxiety.” Worries among citizens of U.S. allies and partners about rising
nuclear threats and nuclear proliferation risks critically shape U.S. foreign policy in East Asia. This
paper thus asks: What drives nuclear anxiety in East Asia? And how can the United States mosteffectively resolve it? We situate nuclear anxiety in the dynamics of abandonment and entrapmentthat exist between allied states, as well as in the unique regional security structure, or the hub-andspoke system. To better understand the implications of nuclear anxiety on regional nuclear policy,
we analyze the results of an original survey conducted in June 2023 across five states in East Asia:
Australia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The survey results suggest the presence ofthe dynamics of both entrapment and abandonment among these regional actors, as well as mixed
interests in indigenous nuclear programs. In addition, we demonstrate how citizens of East Asia
evaluate possible policy options that could help Washington mitigate regional nuclear anxiety.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

19

SECTION 4: POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
While, in general, we recognize that policymakers tend to view “stronger deterrence” as the best
way to respond to increasing threat perceptions in the region, our scenario analysis has affirmed
repeatedly that actions taken in the name of deterrence are a major driver of nuclear risk, increasing
both crisis- and arms-racing instability. Therefore, our recommendations seek to create a regionalsituation over time—the stability of which relies less on the implicit and explicit threat-making that
deterrence involves. Although our main goal is to minimize risks of nuclear weapon use, the following
recommendations naturally cover not only nuclear policies but also non-nuclear security policies as
the latter might also affect the risks of nuclear weapons use.
Accordingly, the following conceptual and methodological framework guides our policy advice.
Conceptually, we distinguish structural and situational risks, aligning proposed policy actions along
one or both dimensions of nuclear insecurity problems. As mentioned above, structural risk refers
to rational incentives to use nuclear weapons (crisis instability) or escalate an arms competition(arms racing instability). Situational risk refers to the degree of reliance on coercive military signaling
toward an adversary within discrete scenarios.
In so doing, our collection of policies aim to reduce nuclear risk in two ways. One is by narrowing
the space for nuclear use-case scenarios to arise in the first place through forms of mutual threat
reduction (structural). The other is by helping to better responsibly manage within-scenario(situational) risks should they arise. The former approach helps create a regional situation where
stability does not hinge solely on threats that leave something to chance. The latter approach to
reducing risk potentially applies both before nuclear weapons have been used and after, inhibiting
nuclear-related escalation in the midst of a crisis or once a nuclear detonation has occurred.
By orchestrating policies on two fronts and with a consistent purpose, our recommendations aim
to do what most nuclear policy recommendations make no conscious attempt to do—shift theoverall valence or perception of states possessing nuclear weapons in a way that makes the whole(the collection of policy advice taken together) more impactful than the sum of its parts (individual
recommendations). The context within which rivals end up in crises should not be taken for granted
and must be acted upon through consistent, rational, and—as much as possible—principled policy
choices. In short, our goal is to move from the situation in right upper box to lower left box of
Figure 1.
Methodologically, we start by grounding our recommendations in the following interlocking/mutually reinforcing principles, which emerged from our years one-three conclusions:

Transparency

Predictability

Strategic Empathy

Rebalancing Deterrence
and Reassurance

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe20Transparency:
In our analysis, a recurring source of conventional conflict and nuclear escalation was a lack ofclarity—about defense commitments, nuclear first-use credibility, defensive versus revisionist
intentions, the reasoning behind weapons procurement and force posture moves, and the reasons
why military force would be deployed and/or used. Nuclear-relevant policies should therefore ensurethat actors accurately grasp the capability, commitment thresholds, operational readiness, andsituational resolve of one another.

Predictability:
Stability depends to a great extent on predictability. Erratic, inconsistent decision-making tends
to undermine credibility.19 Whatever hypothetical margin of advantage erraticism might offer in acrisis confrontation, unpredictability heightens uncertainty before and after crises, pushing actors
to make the worst assumptions about the others’ character.20 Predictably patterned words anddeeds should therefore be the basis of any overall nuclear policy framework whose aim is a long-run
stability that creates the preconditions needed for nuclear disarmament.

Strategic empathy:
Insensitivity to the decision-making pressures that other governments face or the motivations
driving their choices is a recurring source of nuclear risk. Strategic empathy as a practice or an ethic
entails a willingness to think about security beyond zero-sum configurations, and to account for theconcerns of societies, politics, and human emotion.21 In this way, strategic empathy offers a means
to guard against pathologies that lead to unrealistic assessments of problems (like threat inflation)and the false certainties about competitors that can drive security dilemmas.22

Rebalancing deterrence and reassurance:
Deterrence has become pervasive in governmental explanations of nuclear and security policies.
The problem is that, rather than embracing the concept of deterrence as properly understood—
the use of threats to prevent unwanted actions—policymakers, especially militaries, now routinely
misappropriate deterrence as a language for justifying militarized policies that do not attend to therisks they incur. Even in the most popular understandings of coercion theory, deterrence cannot

19 For a review of the inputs to credibility, see especially Robert Jervis, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and Don Casler, “Redefining the
Debate Over Reputation and Credibility in International Security: Promises and Limits of New Scholarship.” World Politics
Vol. 73, no. 1 (2021), pp. 167–203.
20 For how uncertainty drives pessimistic assumptions between competitors, see Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images inInternational Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).
21 Claire Yorke, “Is Empathy a Strategic Imperative? A Review Essay,” Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 46, no. 5 (2023), pp.
1082-1102.
22 Classical security dilemmas are driven by uncertainty, but they can also be driven by false certainties. See especially
Alastair Iain Johnston, “Identity, Race, and U.S.-China Conflict,” Sir Howard Kippenberger Lecture, Victoria University of
Wellington (June 6, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnUT13zi2zg

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

21

logically work unless threats are perceived as conditional, which means even adversaries must be
offered reassurances.23 For this reason, the emphasis on deterrence needs to be rebalanced witha commensurate prioritization of the principle of reassurance: “the more powerful and credible
one’s threat of military action, the more important and the more difficult it is to credibly assure thepotential adversary.”24
Armed with these guiding principles, we proceed by building on the insights from year one andyear two of this project, each of which had its own approach to structuring analysis. For each
recommendation, we include four components:•

First, we summarize what the recommendation is.

•

Second, we explain the reasoning in support of the recommendation—that is, why or how
the proposed policy would reduce the potential for nuclear weapons detonations in the realworld as part of other recommendations made here.

•

Third, we address what makes the proposed policy actionable or politically feasible, and by
whom.

•

Fourth, we specify how the recommendation relates to the prior year one and year two
research, specifically addressing whether the recommendation aims to reduce situationalrisks within nuclear use-case scenarios or structural risks that affect the prospect of such
scenarios arising.

There is little hope of securing negotiation- or cooperation-based risk reduction in a context where
all parties are engaged in missile proliferation, nuclear expansion, and jingoism. We must work tochange that context. Recognizing that reciprocal tit-for-tat bargaining is something that must be
unlocked by satisfying antecedent conditions,25 many of our recommendations involve attempting
to shape the larger security environment so as to “ripen” it for not only crisis avoidance but also
future negotiations aimed at threat reduction of various kinds.26

23 Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 74; Janice Gross Stein, “Reassurancein International Conflict Management,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 106, no. 3 (1991), pp. 431-51;
24 Bonnie Glaser, Jessica Chen Weiss, and Thomas Christensen, “Taiwan and the True Sources of Deterrence,” Foreign
Affairs (November 30, 2023), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/taiwan-china-true-sources-deterrence
25 Charles Osgood, An Alternative to War or Surrender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962); Svenn Lindskold, “Trust
Development, the GRIT Proposal, and the Effects of Conciliatory Acts on Conflict and Cooperation,” Psychological BulletinVol. 85, no. 4 (1978), pp. 775-7; Toshio Yamagishi, Satoshi Kanazawa, Rie Mashima, and Shigeru Terai, “Separating Trust fromCooperation in a Dynamic Relationship,” Rationality and Society Vol. 17, no. 3 (2005), pp. 275-308; Amitai Etzioni, The Hard
Way to Peace: A New Strategy (New York: Crowell-Collier, 1962); Seymour Melman, The Peace Race (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1961); Mulford Sibley, Unilateral Initiatives and Disarmament (Philadelphia, PA: American Friends Service Committee,
1962).
26 On the concept of ripeness and how it affects negotiations, see Michael Greig, “Moments of Opportunity: Recognizing
Conditions of Ripeness for International Mediation between Enduring Rivals,” Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 45, no. 6(2001), pp. 691-718; I. William Zartman, Ripe for Resolution: Conflict and Intervention in Africa (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985).

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

22Our recommendations address every regional stakeholder. Even though the United States still has
the world’s most modern and globe-spanning military, and it possesses the largest defense budget
by far, its military prowess is declining in relative terms, especially in relation to the balance of forces
with China across the Taiwan Strait. Yet, the United States is in the strongest position to catalyze
positive change in the world. But it realistically requires active leadership—even lobbying—fromallies and partners like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in support of new policy thinking. US allies
have security concerns that must be taken seriously, but everyone has a stake in policies that canavert nuclear war. We therefore assume that the United States and its allies can not only reduce risk
through traditional cooperative initiatives with competitors but also by individually regulating theirchoices in ways that we specify below.
Finally, the likelihood of our recommended policies achieving their desired effect of reducing nuclear
risks is affected by the degree to which they are adopted as a collection of policies. A common
limitation in nuclear policy is analyzing policy ideas in isolation, holding constant all aspects of ourcurrent world while introducing only a marginal change to one factor or another. Isolating policies inthis way ignores how the effects of variables can substantially shift given different contexts.
No single recommendation can realistically transform the context of nuclear decision-making, andthe discrete policy recommendations that we made are affected by the whole.
The following policy recommendations have been organized according to how they define thespace for policy movement—warming actions (rhetorical and diplomatic gestures); ripening actions(individual restraint); and reciprocal transformations.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe23Warming Actions
Warming actions are rhetorical and diplomatic gestures aimed at alleviating tension in
the security environment and setting up frameworks for future confidence-building
and cooperation. They entail no strategic costs—that is, in and of themselves,
warming actions do not change the balance of nuclear forces or leave actors more
vulnerable to attack.

Ripening Actions
Ripening actions are decisions that can be undertaken unilaterally to improve thepolitical feasibility of future cooperation. These recommendations build confidence
among rival actors that future cooperative initiatives could bear fruit by decreasing
the costs and risks a rival might incur. Ripening actions are the inverse of the paradoxof deterrence—instead of achieving stability by threatening destruction, they achieve
stability by credibly signaling benign, defensive intentions. The potential strategic
cost of these recommendations is what makes them credible signs of
non-aggressive intentions.

Reciprocal Transformations
The recommendations in these three categories are presented in phases—warming (rhetorical
Reciprocalgestures)transformations
are bilateralmultilateralnegotiations;
initiatives
and diplomatic
precedesripeningand(individual
restraint),
which precedes
reciprocal
that
can
only
follow
fromprocessofmutualaccommodation
andcompromise.
transformations (multilateral processes). The individual recommendations, moreover, are roughly
Recommendationsin thiscategory
constitutea measurable,favorable
shift in theorderedfrom most-to-least
feasiblemeasuresfor reducing
structuralor situationalrisks, based on
Northeast
Asian
securityenvironment,
reducing
structuralrisks
ofnuclearuse
andexperts.
the inputs of rank-orderings provided by more than a dozen nuclear and Northeast Asia
creating greater distance from future nuclear crises.

But these categories and their recommendations are not fixed and can be pursued simultaneously.
For example, declaring mutual co-existence with China and North Korea can happen in parallelwith investment in non-offensive defense research, defunding the SLCM-N cruise missile,
multilateralizing an anti-satellite testing moratorium, and negotiating end-use restrictions on missile
sales. We wish to stress that these categories represent a logical progression, and merely define thecontent from which diplomatic and political actors can assemble strategies to reduce nuclear risks.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe24Warming Actions—Rhetorical and Diplomatic Gestures•

Rescope extended deterrence dialogues between Japan and South Korea for risk reduction(Japan, ROK, US)•

Declare mutual co-existence with China and North Korea, end to the Korean War, andrecognize reciprocal vulnerability between Chinese and US nuclear forces (US)•A nuclear no-first use dialogue (China, US)•

Revive the “non-offensive defense” research agenda (Japan, US, ROK)•

A “No Leadership Assassinations” pledge (US, DPRK, China, ROK, Japan)•

A US strategic dialogue with North Korea (US, DPRK)

Ripening Actions—Individual Restraint•

A “no nuclear deployment” executive order (US)•Elevate the CTBT (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)•

Checks and balances on South Korea’s “Three-Axis” deterrence policy (ROK, US)•

End-use restrictions on missile and drone sales (US, China, Japan, ROK)•

Codify the US moratorium on anti-satellite testing (US)•Support the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act (US, Japan, ROK, China DPRK)•Defund the nuclear-armed SLCM-N (US)•Pause and investigate permanently halting development of ground-based
intermediate-range missiles (US, China, ROK, DPRK)•A declaration of nuclear inventory from North Korea and China (DPRK, China)•

Rollback the US “Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent” (US)Reciprocal Transformations—Bilateral and Multilateral Initiatives•

Multilateralize a moratorium on anti-satellite testing (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)•Advanced conventional arms freeze (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)•

A missile-launch notification regime (Japan, US, China, ROK, DPRK)

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe25•A “no-dead-hand” nuclear restriction (China, DPRK, US)•

A ban on low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons (China, DPRK, US)•

Support a 2% defense conversion for the US and Northeast Asia (Japan, US, China, ROK,
DPRK)

•

A “nuclear-free seas” initiative with North Korea (DPRK, China, US, ROK)WARMING ACTIONSPolicy Proposal: Rescope Extended Deterrence Dialogues with Japan and South
Korea for risk reduction
Recommendation
Japan, the United States, and South Korea should propose and negotiate risk-reduction goals in
extended deterrence-related engagements with Japan and South Korea.

Reasoning
Since 2010, the US Office of the Secretary of Defense and the State Department haveinstitutionalized dialogue consultations with Japan and South Korea respectively addressing theirconcerns with nuclear security and the credibility of US extended deterrence commitments.
In practice, these dialogues have functioned as vehicles for expanding the role of nuclear weapons inregional security and legitimating an increase in the frequency of nuclear-related military exercises
and weapons deployments—policy decisions that, contrary to the well-intentioned assumption ofpolicymakers, have made the region less secure and goaded North Korea to advance its nuclear
capabilities further and faster. These dialogues should be rescoped to serve as a venue for allies
to have honest conversations about the most effective ways to ensure that deterrence policies
deter—rather than provoke—and reduce exposure to nuclear and militarized violence without the
prejudicial assumption that more nuclear signaling equals more deterrence (for which there is no
unique evidence).
If the end goal of extended deterrence dialogues is to minimize the chances of an ally being attacked
by nuclear weapons, the dialogues should be agnostic about the best ways to achieve that goal.
Military restraint, arms limitations, and diplomatic initiatives are logical and proven means of
reducing nuclear risk.
This proposal facilitates reducing nuclear risk by managing ally fears of abandonment and making
allies stakeholders in US initiatives that aim to make Northeast Asia more stable. Allies are a potential
spoiler in any attempt to deviate from a status quo that has only grown more dangerous over the
past 15 years. A communication stream that takes ally extended-deterrence related concerns
seriously while ensuring the conversations remain faithful to the end goal—no nuclear use—amountto a rear-guard action that facilitates other risk-reduction policy proposals.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

26Implementation
This proposal is feasible because risk-reduction measures and extended deterrence measures
purport to have the same desired aim of foreclosing on the prospect of nuclear use. There exists
no restriction on the content of conversations about extended deterrence among allies. And there
is no cost to this proposal—existing budgets already fund the dialogues and ally defense ministries
already allocate time and personnel to the holding the consultations.

Risks Addressed
Rescoping extended deterrence dialogues primarily addresses situational sources of risk. Several of
our prior-year nuclear use-case scenarios hinged on extended deterrence considerations and ally
conduct in the midst of crisis.
In one scenario, the United States used nuclear weapons on the grounds that a North Korean HEMP
burst had triggered US extended deterrence commitments.
In a second scenario, North Korea misperceived the aggressive intentions of the alliance becauseof South Korean military actions, leading it to launch nuclear weapons in what it believed was apreemptive, defensive attack.
In a third scenario, North Korea perceived the alliance as “weak,” feeling emboldened to take military
action that triggered South Korean retaliation, spiraling into nuclear use.
In all these cases, alliance decision-making was a major factor in the circumstances that led
to nuclear conflict. The proposed rescoping of the extended deterrence dialogue mechanism
potentially tightens coordination with allies in a manner that simultaneously avoids automaticthresholds for nuclear use, undue perceptions of “weakness,” and false-positive nuclear
preemption.

Policy Proposal: Declaring Mutual Co-Existence, No Regime Change, Reciprocal
Vulnerability
Recommendation
The United States should match the deeds prescribed in this report with words that reflect itschanged outlook on nuclear weapons and security issues.
Specifically, the US government should publicly reiterate that it:•

Seeks mutual co-existence with China and North Korea.

•

Considers the Korean War to be over.

•

Recognizes the reciprocal vulnerability of US and Chinese nuclear forces to each others’
targeting capabilities.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

27

Reasoning
These declarations lack power on their own, but when they reflect changes in US policy practice—that is, material shifts in US nuclear and defense policy, as well as corresponding diplomatic
initiatives—they become a necessary part of ripening the regional security environment to makeit more amenable to demilitarized and tit-for-tat confidence-building measures. Moreover,recognizing the reality that nuclear forces are reciprocally vulnerable to attack weakens imperatives
for both arms-racing and nuclear-first use.

Implementation
The US government—including previous US presidents—have issued statements that recognize
all of these realities, but they have never done so consistently and none of these reflect actual
US policy positions. In 2019, the Korean War was nearly declared over. The United States alreadyacknowledges a condition of mutual vulnerability with Russia. And the United States was willing toaccept mutual co-existence with the Soviet Union during the darkest days of the Cold War. Any
president willing to alter the balance of relations in Northeast Asia would have ample precedent for
taking these declaratory actions. This proposal is ideally combined with the proposal on a
“No Leadership Assassinations” Pledge described later in this section on warming actions.

Risks Addressed
This proposal aims squarely at addressing structural risks of nuclear use by softening theenvironment within which China and North Korea take their strategic decisions. Declarations bythemselves do not necessarily achieve anything, but linking them with other policies prescribed inthis report ripens the decision-making environment in ways favorable to restrained and cooperative
policymaking.

Policy Proposal: A Nuclear No-First Use (NFU) Dialogue between China andthe US
Recommendation
The United States and China should institutionalize a dialogue on nuclear strategy, stability,
perceptions of NFU commitments, mutual vulnerability, and perspectives on deterrence. In theprocess of the dialogue, the US should well establish close communication with allies to address
their security concerns for NFU while at the same time encouraging them to take a constructive
approach.

Reasoning
The primary argument against the United States declaring an NFU policy is that adversaries will notbelieve it and will therefore proceed with planning and assuming that the United States could launch
nuclear first-strikes if it sees advantages in doing so. This opposition to declaring NFU is based
partly on “cheap-talk” reasoning—words alone will not change adversary perceptions of something
as costly as nuclear use—and partly on the mirror-image reality that many US policymakers do notbelieve China’s already-existing rhetorical commitment to NFU.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe28A strategic dialogue about NFU would begin to address two-way credibility problems. An NFUrelated dialogue between China and the United States would also facilitate other policy moves
prescribed in this report, including providing a vehicle for communicating Washington’s thinking
as it undertakes internal changes to implement a no-first use policy, which would involve individual
and reciprocal actions to restrain the threat, use, and buildup of nuclear weapons (contra simply adeclaration of no-first use, which might not involve any material actions).

Implementation
Nuclear experts, strategists, and former officials from the United States and China met annually instrategic stability dialogues that were suspended with the onset of great-power rivalry during the
Trump administration. Prior to the 2023 San Francisco summit between Xi Jinping and President
Biden, both sides agreed to engage in broad, publicly undefined talks on nuclear and strategic
issues.27 And there have been signs from Chinese scholars that China is open to specificallyengaging in talks with the United States about NFU policies as an opening to discuss a range ofissues relating to deterrence, reassurance, and the credibility of commitments by both sides.28
There is a window, in other words, to broach the topic of NFU with China as a means of having an
enlarged conversation about mutual strategic concerns.

Risks Addressed
The point of strategic dialogues like this is to maximize clarity and predictability in how actors
perceive one another. Even in the worst case, their attendance/suspension become signaling toolsthat help clarify actor intentions. Misperception was at the heart of several of our nuclear use-casescenarios, including more than one involving nuclear conflict between China and the US.
A dialogue around NFU could indirectly support risk reduction if it shrinks the space for
miscalculations and enables other stabilizing—even cooperative—policy choices that would be
difficult to pursue otherwise.

Policy Proposal: Reviving the “Non-Offensive Defense” Research Agenda
Recommendation
The governments of Japan, the United States and South Korea, as well as concerned philanthropic
foundations, should sponsor a revival of “non-offensive defense” in strategic studies research.

27 Michael Gordon, “China, U.S. to Meet for Rare Nuclear Arms-Control Talks,” Wall Street Journal (November 1, 2023),
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/china-agrees-to-arms-control-talks-with-u-s-87a44b38
28 Tong Zhao, “It’s Time To Talk About No First Use,” Foreign Policy (November 6, 2023), https://foreignpolicy.
com/2023/11/06/united-states-china-nuclear-meeting-no-first-use-arms-control/

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

29Reasoning
During the 1970s and 1980s, security scholars in Europe—and eventually the United States—built arobust program of “non-offensive defense” (NOD) research. It incubated a repertoire of ideas for
how to shape defense policy to reduce risks of military aggression and create space for arms control
and disarmament initiatives.29 The “nuclear freeze” movement of the 1980s emerged from and had
the backing of the same milieu of scholars and analysts that were focused on the non-offensive
defense research agenda.30
However, with the end of the Cold War, the philanthropic foundations and governments that had
supported NOD research shifted their priorities overwhelmingly to non-military issues, leaving
the knowledge base that frames and guides nuclear and defense strategies without alternatives
to a deterrence paradigm. The generally recognized contemporary problem of over-reliance on
deterrence—a way of thinking that perpetuates existential risks that no person can fully control—isinadequate to the needs of global security. But without sustained investment in alternative concept
development that accounts for the concerns addressed by deterrence itself, efforts to reduce
nuclear risk will always be held hostage to the exigencies of national security.

Implementation
Japan’s pacifist tradition makes it a natural leader on non-offensive strategic thinking. Reviving
the long-dormant tradition of NOD research could be driven by state sponsorship or by academic,
civic, and philanthropic institutions dissatisfied with the narrow range of policies that are rationallyavailable to reduce nuclear risk. Relative to national defense expenditures, the cost would be
extremely low, and the potential upside is the prospect of building a knowledge base that makes it
possible for humanity to escape recurring crises that threaten mass extinction.

Risks Addressed
This proposal aims to address structural risks of nuclear use, indirectly and over time. It is obviousthat states are not making themselves more secure by arms-racing, brinkmanship, and deploymentsof force, but they do it anyway. Our nuclear use-case scenarios revealed that policymakers in every
nation tend to feel trapped by circumstances, and are often unable to make sense of events except
with reference to deterrence policies that perpetually hold them and their successors at risk ofcatastrophe.

29 See, for example, Bjorn Moller and Hakan Wiberg, eds., Non-Offensive Defence for the 21st Century (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1994); Dietrich Fischer and Alan Bloomgarden, “Non Offensive Defense,” Peace Review Vol. 1, no. 2 (1989), pp. 7-11;
Wilhelm Agrell, “Offensive versus Defensive: Military Strategy and Alternative Defence,” Journal of Peace Research Vol. 24,
no. 1 (1987), pp. 75-85.
30 Randall Forsberg, Toward a Theory of Peace: The Role of Moral Beliefs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

30Policy Proposal: A US Strategic Security Dialogue with North Korea
Recommendation
Given the increasing risk of accidental or unintended nuclear weapons use due to misperceptions
or misunderstanding, the United States should propose an ongoing, multilevel strategic security
dialogue with North Korean defense and intelligence counterparts aimed at complementing foreign
ministry-led diplomatic talks and exchanging information about US and North Korean strategic
thinking and threat perceptions.

Reasoning
Managing risks of misperception and miscalculation require a maximally accurate understanding of
how North Korea thinks about coercion, nuclear doctrine, and conditions of nuclear use. Secondarily,
having US national security officials build (admittedly thin) social ties to North Korean officials
could help soften the sense of siege that prevails among North Korean elites and may encourage
advocacy for less hardline policies within North Korean bureaucratic decision-making.

Implementation
At multiple points in past decades, parts of the North Korean security state, including the Korean
People’s Army (KPA), have expressed interest in dialogue with the US military. In relative terms,
the KPA and the security apparatus have far more influence within Kim Jong Un’s regime than its
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Extremely detailed proposals for how to run a security-dialogue process with North Korea alreadyexist but have simply not been attempted.31

Risks Addressed
This proposal supports other recommendations made in this report and indirectly helps ameliorate
situational risks associated with crisis instability.
When rivals’ military doctrines are logically incompatible or based on inaccurate expectations of how
the other side will respond to your deployment of force, deterrence becomes a source of conflict
escalation.32 In our nuclear use-case scenarios, the most common pathway to nuclear use involved
one side or the other misperceiving and thereby incorrectly anticipating how its adversary would
react to military deployments or targeted strikes. North Korean military leaders’ exposure to US
strategic perspectives—and US insights into North Korean military doctrine and strategic thought—

31 For the most detailed proposal and a partial history of KPA interest in dialogue, see Van Jackson, How to Engage theEnemy: The Case for National Security Diplomacy with North Korea (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2020),
https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/09/how-engage-enemy-case-national-security-diplomacy-north-korea
32 This problem is called doctrinal difference theory. Christopher Twomey, The Military Lens: Doctrinal Difference andDeterrence Failure in Sino-American Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe31could help minimize the chances of misunderstandings that risk leading to nuclear escalation.
Counterpart relationships between US and DPRK national security institutions might also facilitatecommunication during a crisis.

Policy Proposal: A “No Leadership Assassinations” Pledge
Recommendation
The United States, in parallel with Northeast Asian governments, should commit to not targeting
national leaders for preemptive or preventive assassination.

Reasoning
On its own, a no-assassinations pledge amounts to “cheap talk”—rhetoric with no inherent
credibility. The same could be said about any declaratory policy or government statement. But takenin the context of other restraint-oriented pledges and policy actions, such a commitment would
contribute to creating greater distance from crisis and a security environment more amenable tospirals of cooperation rather than conflict.

Implementation
A no-assassinations pledge has been discussed in the nuclear policy community as a way to reducerisks associated with the clash of North and South Korean military doctrines,33 which is widely
understood to exhibit peak nuclear precarity relative to other rivalry dyads in Northeast Asia. But its
value for reducing crisis pressures applies to the entire region. Any leadership that gets targeted will
demand retaliation, thereby initiating a cycle of escalation and counter-retaliation that could prove
impossible to control.

Risks Addressed
A no-assassinations pledge would directly address a specific trigger for nuclear first-use in one of
our nuclear use-case scenarios—the use-or-lose pressure of a leadership facing the prospect ofimminent death or last-ditch deterrence through escalation.

33 See, for example, Panda, Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals, pp. 92-3.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

32

RIPENING ACTIONSPolicy Proposal: A “No Nuclear Deployment” Executive Order
Recommendation
The US president should issue an executive order (EO) restricting nuclear-capable bomber
deployments to the Korean Peninsula.

Reasoning
Nuclear crises do not appear out of nowhere—they emerge from situations of acute confrontation.
Ameliorating the confrontational context reduces the prospects of crises erupting.
US nuclear-capable bombers have been used in the past primarily as a signaling tool toward North
Korea, and secondarily as a reassurance signaling tool toward South Korea at the expense of greater
hostility with the North. Bridling this kind of crude signaling is a means of managing stable relations.

Implementation
Presidential Executive Orders carry the force of law and do not require the authorization of any otherbranch of government. There is also precedent for such a restriction on bomber deployments. From
the time of the first summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un in June 2018 until roughly 2020, theUnited States maintained a voluntary moratorium on nuclear-capable bombers (specifically the B1B
and B-52 bomber aircraft, even though the B1B is no longer nuclear-capable) visiting in or around the
Korean Peninsula. That period was also the calmest between the United States and North Korea inmore than a decade. An EO would simply formalize that prior policy direction.

Risks Addressed
Restricting nuclear-capable bomber deployments would reduce situational risk in Korea by
restraining one of the most provocative signaling tools available in the US arsenal. Because nuclear
bomber deployments have a track record of achieving nothing in relation to North Korea except
sometimes goading hostile rhetoric and incentivizing North Korean missile tests,34 suspending themwould amount to a confidence-building gesture that also reduces opportunities for North Koreanleadership to discriminate between conventional and nuclear weapons platforms. So doing could
ameliorate some of the risk in one of our nuclear use case scenarios that saw North Korea resort tonuclear-first use because it misperceived that it was facing an imminent nuclear attack from theUnited States.

34 Van Jackson, “The Trouble with the B-52 Bomber Overflight Against North Korea,” The Diplomat (January 12, 2016),
https://thediplomat.com/2016/01/the-trouble-with-the-us-bomber-overflight-against-north-korea/.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

33Policy Proposal: Elevate the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty
Recommendation
The US president should issue an executive order expressing the intent to ratify the Comprehensive
Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and directing US compliance with the CTBT until then. With
leadership from Japan and South Korea, it should simultaneously seek North Korean entry into the
CTBT, Chinese ratification of the CTBT, and Russian re-entry into the CTBT.

Reasoning
An era increasingly defined in terms of “great-power rivalry” needs to constrain how arms
competition between nuclear states finds expression. If either China or the United States is tempted
to engage in nuclear testing—whether for signaling purposes or research and development—theother side will feel free to do the same and may even feel compelled to do so.
At the same time, the secular decline in traditional arms control has coincided with an emphasis on
nuclear modernization and expansion by states with nuclear weapons—including the United States.
Arresting that trend, or at least slowing it, requires taking measures to shore up what remains of a
global regime of norms and treaties, of which the CTBT remains a part.

Implementation
An executive order (EO) addressing unilateral CTBT compliance would have the force of law andlargely restate the policy adherence to the CTBT, which the United States maintains. Russia’s
withdrawal from the CTBT in 2023 was undertaken on the grounds that the United States had not
ratified the CTBT. North Korean nuclear testing has not violated the CTBT because it was not a party
to it. China has already signed the CTBT (and complies with its terms) but—like the United States—
has simply not ratified it.

Risks Addressed
Elevating the CTBT by seeking Russia’s re-entry, Chinese and US expressions of intent to ratify,andNorth Korean de facto compliance would indirectly address the structural risks of nuclear use.
Nuclear tests create a sense of both urgency and competitive one-upmanship that becomeskindling for future nuclear crisis. The CTBT makes an incremental contribution to reducing structuralrisk by discouraging nuclear signaling through testing and alleviating—rather than heightening—theurgency driving nuclear modernization.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

34Policy Proposal: Checks and Balances on South Korea’s “Three-Axis Deterrence”
PolicyRecommendation
South Korea and the United States should jointly propose ways to regulate and restrain South
Korea’s “three-axis deterrence” policy linking precision-guided munitions, a doctrine of Korean
Massive Punishment and Retaliation (KMPR), and ballistic missile defenses.
This could include measures that: ensure the United States remains “in the loop” as part of any
South Korean decision to launch cruise missiles or unmanned aerial systems at North Koreantargets; establish clear thresholds or scenarios for invoking KMPR strikes; forswear assassination
attacks on national leadership (one of our separate recommendations); and build public confidence
that “three-axis deterrence” is a strictly retaliatory (not preemptive) policy.

Reasoning
South Korea advertises its “three-axis deterrence” policy as a non-nuclear countermeasure tobalance North Korea’s nuclear weapons, thereby deterring North Korean aggression. But that claim
misunderstands the role of North Korean nuclear weapons in a way that actually heightens risks ofnuclear use through crisis instability.
North Korea sees its nuclear weapons as an antidote to its position of structural insecurity
vis-à-vis the United States and its alliance with South Korea.35 If North Korea has a first-use,
asymmetric escalation nuclear posture—and there are indications it does—then threatening its
regime leadership with missile strikes substantially increases the likelihood of North Korean nuclear
use by either putting it on a hair trigger or pushing it closer to a use-or-lose mindset.36 If North
Korea instead has a second-use, assured retaliation nuclear posture, then South Korea has noneed to counterbalance North Korean nuclear weapons and derives no benefit from escalating an
asymmetric arms race. It is also possible that North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons endows
it with a sense that it can engage in non-nuclear coercive activity toward South Korea or the UnitedStates with impunity, but the remedy in that case must either be to arrest the rivalry itself—thereby
making relations inhospitable to coercion—or retaliatory punishment (not preemption) of North
Korean transgressions.

Implementation
South Korea has created an entire organizational apparatus to support this “three-axis deterrence”
policy—including formation of a Korean Strategic Command meant to be a counterpart to US

35 Van Jackson, On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
36 James Acton and Ankit Panda, “North Korea’s Doctrinal Shifts Are More Dangerous Than Missile Launches,” Foreign
Policy (November 4, 2022), https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/04/north-korea-nuclear-doctrine-more-dangerous-than-missilelaunches/

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

35Strategic Command. That means there is a central entry point in the Korean government forreforming deterrence policies. Because South Korea still relies heavily on the United States for theintelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities required to launch precision strikes
against North Korean targets, the United States should have some ability to insist on some checks
and balances to ensure deterrence policies are not primed for failure.

Risks Addressed
Checking the escalatory potential of South Korea’s three-axis deterrence policy would be a major
step toward reducing both structural and situational risks.
Structurally, South Korea’s approach to deterrence creates every incentive for North Korea to adopt

a first-use nuclear posture regardless whether that actually is its current posture.
Situationally, one of our nuclear use-case scenarios involved North Korea resorting to nuclear first-

use because it misperceived an imminent attack on North Korean leadership. South Korea’s “threeaxis deterrence” policy makes that misperception in the midst of crisis much more likely—it is in facta direct statement of the policy. Conditioning or restraining the policy thus becomes one specific
way of reducing situational risk in Korea.

Policy Proposal: End-Use Restrictions on Missile and Drone Sales to Avoid
Targeting Nuclear Weapon Systems
Recommendation
Precision-guided munitions should not target nuclear weapons systems to avoid inadvertent nuclear
escalation. China should introduce end-use restrictions on its missile and drone sales. Japan andSouth Korea should pledge not to target Chinese or North Korean nuclear-related weapons systems
with advanced cruise missiles or drones. And the United States should require end-use restrictions
on the sale or transfer of any drone or cruise missile system capable of targeting Chinese or
North Korean nuclear-related operations.37 At present, this means the Tomahawk land-attack cruise
missile system, which the State Department approved Japan to purchase in 2023,38 but it should
also apply to unmanned aerial systems. The restriction could entail either a commitment to nooperational use of the missile outside of alliance (with the US) command and control arrangements,
or an agreement by the end user not to use its munitions for nuclear targeting.

37 A narrower version of this recommendation first appeared in Panda, Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals, p. 90.
38 “US State Dept OKs potential sale of 400 Tomahawk missiles to Japan-Pentagon” Reuters (November 18, 2023),
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-state-dept-oks-potential-sale-400-tomahawk-missiles-japanpentagon-2023-11-17/

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

36Reasoning
The goal of the restriction is to ensure that the end users of US (and Chinese) precision-guided
munitions do not use those weapons to target the nuclear command, control, and communication(NC3) or nuclear forces of adversaries because so doing would risk nuclear escalation. Allies thatabide by the proposed end-use restriction reduce the possibility of nuclear escalation during a
conventional conflict.

Implementation
As Ankit Panda points out, “existing U.S. law concerning arms exports already requires thatdecisions take into consideration whether the supply of a requested item could ‘increase thepossibility of outbreak or escalation of conflict.”’39 The proposal here simply extends that
requirement to stress not only conventional but also unintended or avoidable nuclear conflict, and tosolicit pledges that align with end-use restrictions.

Risks Addressed
This proposal addresses the situational risk associated with striking nuclear-related targets in aconventional conflict. In our nuclear use-case scenarios, one pathway to nuclear first-use involved
nuclear-armed belligerents (China or North Korea) facing a use-or-lose situation in which its NC3
were being destroyed by conventional forces. Any conventional war with nuclear-armed powers
introduces the heightened risk of nuclear escalation, but that risk increases substantially once
its nuclear forces are being targeted. Conventional warfare that escalates to nuclear use is selfdefeating, so all war preparations—which is what rationalizes the transfer of US precision-guided
munitions—must proactively avoid nuclear-related targeting. Allies must abide by this constraint justas the US forces must.

Policy Proposal: Codify the US Moratorium on Anti-Satellite Testing
Recommendation
The United States should codify and expand its unilateral ban on direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT)
missile testing.

Reasoning
The security studies literature, as well as one of our year three commissioned policy papers,
identified dual-capable systems and technologies that intersect with NC3 as posing unique risksof nuclear escalation that did not exist in prior eras.40 As satellites and cyberspace become sites

39 Panda, Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals, p. 90.
40 James Acton, “Escalation Through Entanglement: How the Vulnerability of Command-and-Control Systems Raise theRisks of An Inadvertent Nuclear War,” International Security Vol. 43, no. 1 (2008), pp. 56-99.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

37where nuclear and conventional functions intermingle, inadvertent targeting and inadvertent nuclear
escalation are a growing risk. One way of reducing that risk is through ASAT testing restrictions,because ASAT attacks are the primary means of targeting dual-capable systems in space.

Implementation
In 2022, the Biden administration announced a unilateral moratorium on ASAT missile tests withthe explicit hope of shaping space-related norms in the direction of nuclear stability.41 Given theAmerican military’s heavy reliance on space-based communications relative to China, Russia, andNorth Korea, it is uniquely vulnerable if terrestrial warfare extends to attacking satellites in space. It
is therefore in America’s interest (and that of the global economy) to discourage both space warfare
and the practice of targeting satellites for research and development purposes. While all parties
would benefit from a permanent ban on ASAT missile testing, a US unilateral ban does not need
to be contingent on what other nations do since US ASAT tests would not create any deterrence
advantage.

Risks Addressed
An ASAT testing ban would indirectly reduce structural risks of nuclear first-use by way of shaping
international norms in space. It helps shift the context of future nuclear decisions to be morepredictable, less urgent, and therefore more stable. Nuclear crises are less likely to emerge if theactions of nuclear states are taken within a thicket of restraint-oriented norms and practices.

Policy Proposal: Support the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act
Recommendation
The US Congress should assert congressional war powers to restrict the US president’s unilateralauthority to launch nuclear weapons except when Congress has authorized war. US allies should also
support (or at least not to oppose) such move.

Reasoning
The US president has the legal authority to launch a nuclear war for any reason without priorconsultation with other branches of government. Bridling the ability for a single person to launch
nuclear war would strengthen the credibility of future US declarations of nuclear no-first use. It
would also alleviate some of the existing first-use instability fears that China and North Korea harbor,which in turn would encourage those governments to pursue more restrained nuclear postures.

41 FACT SHEET: Vice President Harris Advances National Security Norms in Space (April 18, 2022), https://www.whitehouse.
gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/04/18/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-advances-national-security-norms-inspace/#:~:text=Today%20at%20Vandenberg%20Space%20Force,for%20responsible%20behavior%20in%20space

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe38Implementation
Congressional members introduced legislation in 2016 and 2021 to restrain presidential nuclear
launch authority except when war has been congressionally authorized.42 The legislation exists, has
previously garnered minority support in the Congress, and has the backing of advocacy groups andcivil society organizations. Restricting launch authority, moreover, is a move that the United States
can undertake on its own without making it contingent on negotiations with China or North Korea.

Risks Addressed
This proposal to support the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act addresses both structuraland situational sources of risk.
Structurally, Northeast Asia’s arms-racing instability risk derives partly from Chinese and North
Korean imperatives to ensure the survivability of their respective nuclear arsenals from US nuclear
attacks. Limiting the conditions during which the US president could legally launch nuclear weapons
to occasions of congressionally authorized warmaking gives added incentives for both China andNorth Korea to avoid war as a way to avoid exposure to nuclear attack. It also alleviates the need for
either China or North Korea to plan for preemptive nuclear first-use scenarios themselves.
Situationally, this proposal deals squarely with one of our nuclear use-case scenarios—“USLeadership Hubris”—in which a hubristic, erratic US president opted to launch nuclear weapons
punitively, out of a not-thoroughly-considered personal conviction that it would “deter” future North
Korean nuclear use.

Policy Proposal: Defund the Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile(SLCM-N)
Recommendation
The US Congress should defund the SLCM-N and the Pentagon should reject making the SLCM-Na program of record in its defense budget submissions.

Reasoning
America’s ability to deter adversary nuclear attacks is not helped by the development and acquisitionof nuclear-armed cruise missiles. The SLCM-N could introduce further risks of deterrence failure
because it could raise the discrimination problem—“The inability of states to distinguish whether
an incoming cruise missile is nuclear or conventional will compound doubt and uncertainty, posing

42 Press Release, “Senator Markey and Rep. Lieu Announce Reintroduction of Bill to Limit U.S. President’s Ability
to Start a Nuclear War,” Office of Senator Ed Markey (January 19, 2021), https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/pressreleases/01/19/2021/senator-markey-and-rep-lieu-announce-reintroduction-of-bill-to-limit-us-presidents-ability-to-start-anuclear-war

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe39a serious threat to crisis communication, stability, and control.”43 Arguments that insist SLCM-N
does not heighten the discrimination problem because air-launched cruise missiles already exist
confuse the ease/difficulty of tracking air-launched versus sea-launched platforms. Congressional
advocates of the SLCM-N argue it helps fill a “missile gap” with China, and that more missiles will
increase overall lethality of friendly forces, thereby strengthening deterrence. However, this issimply untrue. Capability differences are not inherently a problem, and deterrence does not dependon plugging “gaps” or capability imbalances. In the most optimistic case, the purported deterrence
benefits that advocates of SLCM-N expect are redundant with existing capabilities.44

Implementation
US nuclear modernization plans already provide for B61 bombs, air-launched cruise missiles,
and a new nuclear warhead for the Trident D5 SLBM. As George Perkovich has noted, “Thesesystems can, together, do anything the SLCM-N can do.”45 The Biden administration’s FY24
budget submission initially excluded a request for SLCM-N funding, despite support for it fromcongressional Republicans, because its risks were not thought through and its potential use cases
created complications for US conventional capabilities.46 Because our recommendation is to defund
this capability, taking this step to preserve stability actually saves money.

Risks Addressed
Defunding the SLCM-N reduces structural risk as a rearguard action, recognizing that the SLCM-N
capability would “preclude future arms control treaties” as long as the US Navy maintains a policythat would prohibit verification of whether its ships are carrying nuclear payloads.47 It also reduces
situational risk that presents as a discrimination problem: one of our nuclear use-case pathways
involved North Korean and Chinese misperceptions respectively of US/ally military intent. The
discrimination problem heightens that misperception risk, and eliminating the SLCM-N helps to
marginally reduce it.

43 Andrew Facini and Christine Parthemore, Risk Roundup: The Nuclear Sea-Launched Cruise Missile,” Council on Strategic
Risks (June 15, 2022), https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2022/06/15/risk-roundup-the-nuclear-sea-launched-cruise-missile/
44 Michiru Nishida, “Are U.S. Nuclear Sea-Launched Cruise Missiles Necessary? A Japanese Security Analysis” https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Are-U.S.-Nuclear-Sea-Launched-Cruise-Missiles-Necessary_AJapanese-Security-Analysis_BRIEFER-30_2022_02_09.pdf.
45 George Perkovich, “Taxpayers Should Question the Pitch to Fund Another Naval Nuclear Weapon,” Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace Policy Outlook (May 12, 2022), https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/05/12/taxpayersshould-question-pitch-to-fund-another-naval-nuclear-weapon-pub-87120
46 “TAKE ACTION: No Funding for Nuclear-Armed Submarine-Launched Cruise Missiles,” Arms Control Association (2023),
https://www.armscontrol.org/take-action/no-SLCMN-funding
47 Perkovich, “Taxpayers Should Question the Pitch to Fund Another Naval Nuclear Weapon.”

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe40Policy Proposal: Pause and Investigate Permanently Halting Development of
Ground-Based Intermediate-Range Missiles
Recommendation
The United States should pause—and evaluate the merits of a permanent end to—the developmentof all ground-launched, land-attack missiles with strike ranges between 500km and 5,500km. It
should then propose China, North Korea, and South Korea freeze development of missiles within thisrange capability. It should propose China, Russia, North Korea, Japan and South Korea also declarethe same and China, Russia and North Korea immediately freeze development of nuclear missiles
within this range capability.

Reasoning
The United States and Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in
1987 for the express purpose of reducing the substantial nuclear risk associated with a category of
weapon that added little to any argument that might be made on behalf of deterrence. Whatever
deterrent benefit nuclear weapons had could be realized at an intercontinental range. But in theintermediate range, adversaries would find it difficult—even impossible—to discriminate between aconventional (non-nuclear missile) and a nuclear attack.
Since the United States withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, it has resumed testing and developing
ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) with a range of 500+km. Pausing further development
while studying potential alternative defense and deterrence concepts can serve as both atension-reducing measure and an opportunity to evaluate lower-risk alternatives.

Implementation
This proposal requires no new budgetary appropriations (in fact, it saves money). The purported
benefit of GLCMs is in support of a strategic concept (archipelagic defense) that remains
controversial and that the Department of Defense has never officially endorsed. Moreover, themost-likely host of GLCMs is Guam, which would require further exploiting a territory denied
self-determination (itself an unsustainable political problem that the United States has chosen toignore). If study into the merits of GLCMs finds that there is a strategic case for the permanent end
GLCM production, the next step of this proposal would entail a regional verification mechanismthat includes on-site inspections, thereby preventing the Russian violation scenario that the UnitedStates used to justify its withdrawal from the INF Treaty. Such a regional verification mechanism will
be a significant confidence-building measure.

Risks Addressed
Halting intermediate-range missiles alleviates both structural and situational risks. Structurally,
intermediate-range missiles represent an escalation of the Sino-US arms-racing dynamic. To theextent that US intermediate-range missiles nullify the advantages of China’s missile forces, they
compel China to further expand and diversify its missile capabilities.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe41In a crisis, adversaries will find it difficult to know whether they are being targeted by US
conventional or nuclear-tipped missiles and may therefore be forced to assume they face a nuclear
attack. This proposal directly addresses the mechanism (the discrimination problem) that heightens
misperception. Removing US intermediate-range missiles from the adversary equation reduces the
chances for misperception in the fog of war.

Policy Proposal: A Declaration of Nuclear Inventory from North Korea and China
Recommendation
North Korea and China should offer to furnish a full accounting of its nuclear warheads and fissile
material.

Reasoning
For skeptical policymakers in Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo, North Korea’s unwillingness to offer fulltransparency about its nuclear capabilities undermined the arms-reductions momentum summit
diplomacy between the United States and North Korea in 2018 and 2019. Worse, it became the key
measure of proof that North Korea had no intention of fulfilling its various rhetorical commitments
to denuclearization. China, moreover, has rapidly expanded the number of missile silos and it
remains unclear to analysts how many house nuclear warheads or missiles. A declaration of nuclear
inventory from North Korea and China would therefore simultaneously serve as a confidencebuilding measure, a check against anti-arms control hawks seeking to prioritize war planning overwar prevention, and an indicator of a more predictable security environment.

Implementation
The robustness of North Korea’s nuclear deterrent—and therefore its relative sense of security—
is not affected by revealing the size, number, and even location of its nuclear capabilities. It isreasonable to assume US intelligence already knows not only about the full scope of North Korea’s
nuclear capabilities; it knows what the North Korean leadership does not admit to possessing. But
for deterrence this matters little—the US military already targets key sites in North Korea and underno circumstances could it destroy all North Korean nuclear capacity before North Korea is able tolaunch retaliatory strikes. Accordingly, North Korea retains an assured retaliation nuclear deterrent
regardless of what it reveals about its nuclear disposition.
Moreover, during the presidential summit diplomacy of 2018 and 2019, Kim Jong Un had expressed awillingness to furnish full transparency about its nuclear inventory as part of a larger rapprochementand-denuclearization process. That process was sabotaged by poor planning, distrusting agents in
the US and Pyongyang, North Korea’s misplaced expectations of upfront sanctions relief, and the US

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

42insistence that North Korean disarmament precede a durable improvement in bilateral relations.48
All of those process-sabotaging issues can be managed by first ripening the geopolitical context
within which Washington requests a declaration of nuclear inventory.

Risks Addressed
A declaration of nuclear inventory would constitute an important North Korean contribution to
reducing structural risk of nuclear conflict in Northeast Asia. When taken together with otherconfidence-building initiative and military restraint-oriented processes, North Korean nuclear
transparency helps create greater distance from militarized crises and preempts skeptical politicalactors opposed to relations of cooperative co-existence.

Policy Proposal: Rollback the “Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent”
Recommendation
All regional stakeholders should reduce their reliance on ground-based missile forces for deterrence,but the United States specifically should reduce the risk associated with reliance on ICBMs as a“ground-based strategic deterrent” in three steps:•

Cut the overall inventory of the ICBM force by at least 100 missiles•

De-nuclearize them, placing only conventional warheads on ICBMs•

Place remaining ICBMs on mobile platforms

Reasoning
ICBMs have traditionally been thought of as one leg of a holy nuclear deterrence triad alongside
nuclear-armed bombers and nuclear-armed submarines. But the United States does not need
the ICBM in order to remain capable of deterring others from nuclear attacks. One aspect of the
ICBM’s supposed unique value in the triad is that it gives the president the ability to launch a nuclear
warhead instantaneously (with bombers and submarines as delivery vehicles, there is both a longer
time before the warhead reaches the target and more steps in the process of delivering the warhead
to the target). But if the United States has the assured ability to retaliate against nuclear use, which
the other legs of the nuclear triad ensure, then the ICBM is superfluous, needlessly leading an
enemy’s nuclear-armed missiles to target the continental United States.

48 Uri Friedman, “Inside the Collapse of Trump’s Korea Policy,” The Atlantic (December 19, 2019), https://www.theatlantic.
com/politics/archive/2019/12/donald-trump-kim-jong-un-north-korea-diplomacy-denuclearization/603748/; Ankit Panda andVipin Narang, “The Hanoi Summit Was Doomed from the Start,” Foreign Affairs (March 5, 2019), https://www.foreignaffairs.
com/articles/north-korea/2019-03-05/hanoi-summit-was-doomed-start

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

43Implementation
While the deterrence benefits of ICBMs remain at best murky, the cost and risks associated withICBMs have become both more contentious politically and controversial among nuclear analysts.49
As a status quo, US ICBMs are highly vulnerable to enemy targeting and not at all survivable. Placing
them on mobile platforms, rather than in fixed silos, would help. It would also allow for the UnitedStates to reduce the total number of ICBMs from 400 to 300, with 150 in a mobile basing mode,possibly with two warheads each. The gain in survivability would more than compensate for the
fewer numbers of launchers compared to present plans.”50
And because the US missile force is both precise and long-range, the United States can convert its
ICBMs into a “conventional prompt global strike system” without losing any ability to hold enemy
nuclear forces at risk.51

Risks Addressed
This proposal primarily addresses situational risks of nuclear use. In one of our nuclear use-casescenarios—“US Leadership Hubris”—a highly risk-acceptant US president acted on his sole authority
to escalate a conflict to nuclear-first use without adequate checks on his judgment. Eliminating the
ICBM as a strategic deterrent reduces the temptation for a president to live out this scenario.

RECIPROCAL TRANSFORMATIONSPolicy Proposal: Multilateralize a Moratorium on Anti-Satellite Testing
Recommendation
Japan should lead a diplomatic effort to multilateralize the US moratorium on direct-ascentanti-satellite (ASAT) missile testing.

49 See, for example, Emma Claire-Foley, The Real Cost of ICBMs: U.S. Economic Development Beyond Defense Spending(Washington, D.C.: Global Zero, 2022), https://www.globalzero.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The_Real_Cost_of_ICBMs
pdf; Sarah Lazare, “Biden is Using the Ukraine Crisis to Justify Dangerous Investments in Nuclear Weapons,” In These Times(March 28, 2022), https://inthesetimes.com/article/biden-budget-pentagon-nuclear-weapons-icbm-russia-ukraine; Fred
Kaplan, “The Missile Trap,” Slate (March 10, 2021), https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/icbm-gbsd-missile-lobby.html
50 Stephen Cimbala and Lawrence Korb, “Rethinking the US strategic triad: When it comes to nuclear platforms, how manyare enough?” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (December 20, 2023), https://thebulletin.org/2023/12/rethinking-the-us-strategictriad-when-it-comes-to-nuclear-platforms-how-many-are-enough/51 Ibid. See also Jeffrey Lewis and Scott Sagan, “The Nuclear Necessity Principle: Making U.S. Targeting Policy Conform with
Ethics and the Laws of War,” Daedalus Vol. 145, no. 4 (2016), pp. 62-74; Dan Plesch, “Could the US Win World War III Without
Using Nuclear Weapons?” The Conversation (April 19, 2018), https://theconversation.com/could-the-us-win-world-war-iiiwithout-using-nuclear-weapons-94771

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

44Reasoning
The security studies literature, as well as one of our year three commissioned policy papers,
identified dual-capable systems and technologies that intersect with NC3 as posing unique risks ofnuclearescalation that did not exist in prior eras.52 As satellites and cyberspace become sites where
nuclear and conventional functions intermingle, inadvertent targeting and inadvertent nuclear
escalation present a growing risk. All Northeast Asian governments have a stake in reducing thatrisk. Multilateralizing the US moratorium would create a stabilizing restraint-oriented regime where
currently only one government has committed to restraint.

Implementation
Japan is an advanced technological power with no offensive space-based capability, making it anatural leader on ASAT restraint policies.

Risks Addressed
An ASAT testing ban would indirectly reduce structural risks of nuclear first-use by way of shaping
international norms in space. It helps shift the context of future nuclear decisions to be morepredictable, less urgent, and therefore more stable. Nuclear crises are less likely to emerge if theactions of nuclear states are taken within a thicket of restraint-oriented norms and practices.

Policy Proposal: A Regional Missile-Launch Notification Regime
Recommendation
The US government, along with all Northeast Asian governments, should negotiate an agreement tohave a common protocol of notification prior to all missile launches whose range exceeds 300km.

Reasoning
Establishing agreed-upon norms for informing interested parties prior to launching missiles reduces
the chances of a surprise reaction by others when missile launches are conducted. Surprise is a
crucial condition of all crises,53 so reducing the space for surprise reduces the likelihood of crises
occurring.

52 James Acton, “Escalation Through Entanglement: How the Vulnerability of Command-and-Control Systems Raise theRisks of An Inadvertent Nuclear War,” International Security Vol. 43, no. 1 (2008), pp. 56-99.
53 The three attributes of crisis are surprise, unusual or short time durations for decision-making, and perceptions ofimportant values being threatened. See Charles Herman, Crises in Foreign Policy (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe45Implementation
This regime could build on existing precedents for prior notification of missile launches across theregion. Russia and China already notify each other prior to missile launches in excess of 2,000km.54
North Korea sometimes—but not often—issues general notifications to mariners (NOTAM) before
missile launches.55
There is some support for this proposal in the nuclear analyst community.56 Such a regime alsoentails no strategic vulnerability—all information shared is information that can be collected via
open-source and technical intelligence means after a launch, meaning that it entails no security
compromises on the part of the notifying nation. If patterns of cooperation can be established in
Northeast Asia, then the predictability presented in this proposal would be viable as a low-cost
public good in the common interest of each government.

Risks Addressed
A missile-launch notification regime is a measure that primarily addresses structural risks of nuclear
use—minimizing the space for crises to emerge in the first place—rather than helping to manage
any given crisis. If the notification includes information about the missile’s trajectory and payload, it
avoids any possibility of catalyzing action-reaction cycles that fuel perceptions and miscalculations.

Policy Proposal: Advanced Conventional Arms Freeze
Recommendation
The United States should propose a 12-month freeze (with the possibility of extension) in the testing,production, and new deployment of advanced conventional weapons. The freeze would apply to theUnited States and all Northeast Asian militaries.

Reasoning
The nuclear freeze campaign of the 1980s sought to arrest the US-Soviet nuclear arms race
while creating political space for leaders to pursue confidence-building and weapons-reduction
measures.57 This proposal would extend the logic of the nuclear freeze movement to conventionalarmaments—buy space and time for leaders to convert some of their diplomatic capital into
non-military, non-antagonistic purposes by first agreeing to pause further development ofadvanced conventional munitions.

54 Ankit Panda, Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals: Avoiding Spirals and Mitigating Escalation Risks (Washington, DC: Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, 2023), p. 90.
55 https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/us_restrictions/media/notice-for-the-north-korea-pyongyang-fir.pdf
56 Ankit Panda, for example, proposed a narrower, China-focused version of this in Panda, Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals.
57 See especially Henry Maar III, Freeze! The Grassroots Movement to Halt the Arms Race and End the Cold War(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).
What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe46

Implementation
If a conventional freeze proposal is introduced suddenly into a context of escalatingarms-racing, it will fall on deaf ears. But in a context where other stability-oriented reforms arealso being undertaken, a conventional freeze becomes a natural complement to a larger effort to
reduce nuclear risk. And because it proposes simply pausing military advancements for the durationof one defense budget submission, implementation introduces no added risk or insecurity for any
stakeholder.
In the longer-term, this proposal should be accompanied by the development of a regionalverification mechanism.

Risks Addressed
Pursuing cooperative and stability-favoring measures under conditions of nuclear precarity requires
diplomatic space. This proposal, especially in tandem with other recommendations in this report,
helps open that diplomatic space. In that way, a conventional freeze would address structural risks,
temporarily alleviating acutely felt pressures toward arms-racing in favor of mutual restraint.
In so doing, it allows for the deferral of decisions that might increase risks of nuclear first-use while
doubling as a confidence-building measure.

Policy Proposal: A “No-Dead-Hand” Nuclear Restriction
Recommendation
The United States, China, and North Korea should forswear establishing “fail-deadly” perimeter
detection systems that automatically trigger nuclear-armed missile launches based on radar
identification of incoming missiles (known as dead-hand triggers).

Reasoning
Dead-hand triggers have the sole purpose of deterrence. They exist to remove doubts about thecredibility of a retaliatory nuclear strike in the event a nation is attacked by nuclear weapons.
The marginal apparent advantage a dead-hand offers for calculations of deterrence also introduces
obscene risks of technical glitches or false-positive radar detection leading to inadvertent nuclear
launches. The likelihood of such accidents is low, but there is precedent to worry about thepossibility of them, and the stakes of such an outcome are too large to simply accept.58
A no-dead-hand commitment by the United States, China, and North Korea would directly mitigate
one specific form of nuclear first-use pressure (that of inadvertent first-use).

58 David Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Nuclear Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy(New York: Anchor, 2010).

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe47Implementation
As of 2022, the US Department of Defense assessed that China’s PLA was in the process ofestablishing a launch-on-warning (LOW) nuclear posture—similar to a dead-hand trigger in that it
assures nuclear retaliation but its process does not entail automaticity.59 However, China has also
advocated for nations to avoid such risk-generating approaches to nuclear deterrence.60 Because
China has not fully developed the early-warning capability needed to implement this posture, now is
the time to disincentivize it.

Risks Addressed
This proposal addresses a major source of situational risk between China and the United States. In
our nuclear use-case scenarios, one involved a war over Taiwan in which China resorted nuclear
first-use on the logic of escalate-to-de-escalate. But in that scenario, China had neither adead-hand nor a launch-on-warning nuclear posture. There is a high risk that US targeting of theChinese mainland (which is built into US contingency planning for a conflict) would trigger Chinese
nuclear first-use for false-positive reasons.

Policy Proposal: A Ban on Low-Yield “Tactical” Nuclear Weapons
Recommendation
The United States should propose an accord with China and North Korea to ban low-yield “tactical”
nuclear weapons. Because any use of nuclear weapons no matter the yield is strategicallyconsequential, “tactical” may seem a misnomer, but it is the common term of art for low-yield
nuclear warheads intended for battlefield use. What constitutes low-yield includes nuclear artillery,backpack nuclear warheads, and nuclear landmines.

Reasoning
Because tactical nuclear weapons can have a much lower detonation yield than ICBMs or mediumrange ballistic missiles (MRBMs), they invite the extremely risky perception that they are more“usable.” During the Cold War, the US military deployed tactical “backpack” nuclear weapons
to the Korean Peninsula because it addressed a step in the metaphorical “escalation ladder.”61
They were designed to be a nuclear-use option on the way to but still short of mutually assured
destruction. Logically, tactical nuclear weapons invite nothing but risk and it is imperative to halt
their development and proliferation in both Northeast Asia and in the US arsenal.

59 Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2022: Annual Report to Congress(Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2022), p. 99.
60 Ibid.
61 There is no such thing as an escalation ladder—it is a metaphor that gives the impression that escalation can beratcheted and/or dominated by developing the right mix of capabilities.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe48Implementation
America’s tactical nuclear weapons during the Cold War did not appreciably deter its enemies, andtheir global withdrawal at the end of the Cold War had no negative measurable consequence. Today,neither China nor the United States has a foreseeable deterrence advantage in developing tactical
nuclear weapons. North Korea does claim to have what it calls tactical nuclear weapons, but they
use the phrase as shorthand for any operational nuclear warhead designed to reach as far as Guam.
True low-yield warheads are within North Korea’s ability to develop, but the expense of doing so is
not necessarily in Kim Jong Un’s interest considering that they would not enhance North Korea’s
ability to deter US and South Korean capabilities. If Northeast Asia can enter into militarily restrained,
diplomatically cooperative patterns of relations, then an agreement to ban tactical nuclear warheaddevelopment should be easy to secure.

Risks Addressed
Tactical nuclear weapons increase both structural and situational risk, and so foreclosing on their
proliferation in Northeast Asia would diminish both structural and situational risk.
Structurally, the relatively low nuclear yield and “battlefield” operational connotation pushes thecompetitive arms dynamic between belligerents in a direction that encourages all sides to embrace
first-use or launch-on-warning nuclear postures. Arresting that dynamic benefits stability for the
US-China dyad as well as the US-North Korea dyad. Situationally, two of our nuclear use-casepathways involved North Korea resorting to nuclear first-use—in one it was because it misperceived
US and ROK military intent, and in the other it was a “demonstration” attack against a South Koreantarget for coercive purposes. In both types of nuclear first use, “tactical” nuclear warheads would
have been the preferred weapon for nuclear escalation.

Policy Proposal: Support a 2% Defense Conversion to Support Non-Military UN
Goals
Recommendation
Northeast Asian governments, as well as the United States, should agree to redirect two percentof their defense spending to a UN fund that addresses public health, climate adaptation, global
poverty, and inequality.

Reasoning
In 2021, dozens of Nobel laureates launched a “Peace Dividend” campaign, demanding that two
percent of military spending by all governments be directed toward UN programs that addressed

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe49root causes of insecurity.62 Although two-percent reductions in defense are modest, they would
contribute to slowing and perhaps arresting Northeast Asia’s arms-racing pressures. Moreover,because military problems arise from political and socio-economic contexts of competitive
exclusion and power accumulation, diverting a portion of military spending toward upstream sourcesof insecurity would bring greater proportionality to the gross mismatch in how governments allocate
resources in response to existential threats.

Implementation
Notwithstanding the narrow bureaucratic interests of military institutions, this proposal would
give every government the excuse to reallocate more global resources toward global problems.
For the United States in particular, the two-percent diversion could come from some of therecommendations in this report—defunding SLCM-N, foregoing the development ofintermediate-range ground-launched cruise missiles, reducing the ICBM inventory, and converting
ICBMs to a non-nuclear prompt global strike regime. For a country like North Korea, which relieson the military as its largest employer, its defense savings could be internally redirected (toward
economic programs, for example) rather than transferred to a global UN fund.

Risks Addressed
Converting two percent of defense spending to deal with global insecurity challenges works
indirectly to address structural risks of nuclear use. It provides confidence-building momentum.
It also makes a material contribution to some of the recommendations in this report that, taken
together, ripen the geopolitical context in a manner that enables the prospect of replacing conflictspirals with cooperation spirals. The crises that give rise to nuclear first-use possibilities are lesslikely to occur when belligerents are in a restrained, amiable mode. Finally, the imperative toaccelerate nuclear modernization is less acute if funding for it is reduced.

Policy Proposal: A Nuclear-Free Seas Initiative with North Korea and China
Recommendation
The United States should move toward a nuclear-weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia by
negotiating a monitored, mutual ban on nuclear weapons within the Exclusive Economic Zones (200nautical miles) of the Korean Peninsula’s coastlines.

Reasoning
Had this initiative been introduced 10 years ago, North Korea would not currently have a submarinelaunched ballistic missile (SLBM) capability. North Korea’s SLBMs make North Korean missile

62 Dan Sabbagh, “’Colossal Waste’: Nobel Laureates Call for 2% Cut to Military Spending Worldwide,” The Guardian(December 14, 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/14/nobel-laureates-cut-military-spending-worldwide-unpeace-dividend

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe50

launches harder to track and effectively gives it a secure second-strike retaliatory capability, which
substantially increases the costs of any US or South Korean military actions (whether preemptive,
preventive, or retaliatory).
The role of SLBMs in North Korean nuclear strategy is not fixed; the overall lethality of SLBMs could
progress much further, and the more that North Korea puts nuclear-armed submarines out to
sea the greater the opportunity for accidents or inadvertent crises to ensue. A nuclear-free seas
initiative would, at a minimum, inhibit North Korean SLBM operational readiness and disincentivize its
further development.

Implementation
A nuclear-free seas initiative would constitute a maritime-delimited implementation of a Northeast
Asia Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone.63 In several past statements dating back to the 1990s, North
Korea has agreed in principle to restricting how and the extent to which it deploys nuclear weapons
as long as so doing entailed reciprocal restraint from the US.64

Risks Addressed
Nuclear-free seas reduce risk in the same way as a nuclear-weapon-free zone. In addition to helping
generate momentum toward more restrained, cooperative behavior—including the establishment ofa regional nuclear-free zone—a nuclear-free seas initiative would address structural risks of nuclear
use by attempting to: “reverse the on-going attempt by the DPRK to acquire and strengthen its
nuclear deterrent, as well as the counter military actions by Japan and the ROK by means of thestrengthened U.S. extended deterrence including nuclear components.”65 The ongoing monitoringof nuclear-free seas would, moreover, entail a minimum amount of operational coordination acrossthe US, North Korean, and South.

63 John Endicott and Alan Gorowitz, “Track II Cooperative Regional Security Efforts: Lessons From the Limited NuclearWeapons-Free Zone for Northeast Asia,” Pacifica Review: Global Change, Peace & Security Vol. 11, no. 3 (1999), pp.293-323.
64 For a chronology of North Korean precedents supporting the idea that it would commit to a nuclear-weapon-freezone, see Hiromichi Umebayashi, “A Proposal for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone,” paper presented at the Kim Dae Jung
Presidential Library Conference, “Toward Nuclear-Free Korea and Northeast Asia: Issues and Agenda for Action”(December 10, 2014), https://www.recna.nagasaki-u.ac.jp/recna/en-recnaseye/no3-en
65 Umebayashi, “A Proposal for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone.”

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

51

CONCLUSION
In our preceding recommendations, we have described the reasoning, plausibility, and potential
impact of each. Still, some readers might find certain of these proposals
far-fetched all the same. It is natural to scan a list of recommendations and dismiss the ones thatseem impractical in the context of Northeast Asian security today—but the context of Northeast
Asian security today is what must be reshaped in order to make meaningful risk-reducing policies
possible.
Northeast Asia is barreling toward nuclear precarity. Policies oriented toward increased, stronger,
or enhanced deterrence are making the region less secure. In a region facing compounding nuclear
risks, accelerating militarization, and chauvinistic rhetoric, something must be done. To makeambitious cooperative measures aimed at bridling the threat of nuclear weapons politically feasible,
governments must warm and ripen the regional security environment so that leaders are able
to embrace a less destructive path. The declaration, “Let Nagasaki be the Last!” is an ambitious
demand, matched by our ambitious proposals. We call on leaders from the United States andNortheast Asia to help the world ensure that Nagasaki will indeed be the last.66

66 The policy recommendations in the body of the report were roughly ordered from most-to-least feasible measures for
reducing structural or situational risks, based on the inputs of rank-orderings provided by more than a dozen nuclear andNortheast Asia experts. The recommendations below are ordered differently, with country-specific recommendations listed
at the top. Several policy recommendations are shared across countries; those are listed at the bottom.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe52

WE CALL ON JAPAN TO:

1

Lead a diplomatic campaign to multilateralize a moratorium on ASAT
testing, expanding the model adopted by the United States toinclude China, North Korea, Japan, and South Korea.

2

Lead an effort to elevate the CTBT, including a principle of“no-first test.”

3

Pledge not to target nuclear systems with precision-guided
munitions (missiles or drones).

4

Embrace a rescoping of extended deterrence dialogues with the US
to encompass reassurance and nuclear-risk reduction measures.

5

Promote a region-wide (including US) halt to further development ofintermediate-range ground launched missiles.

6

Support the US Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, andencourage Northeast Asian governments to adopt similar legislation.

7

Support a freeze of advanced conventional weapons and reallocate
2% of the defense budget saved to UN programs; lobby Northeast
Asian governments to do the same.

8

Commit to a “No Leadership Assassinations and No Forced Regime
Change” pledge.

9

Support development of a region-wide missile launch
notification regime.

10

Invest in research on non-offensive defense strategic thinking.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe53

WE CALL ON SOUTH KOREA TO:

1Introduce measures to check and reduce risks associatedwith South Korea’s “Three-Axis” deterrence policy.

2

Support a diplomatic campaign to multilateralize a moratorium on
ASAT testing, expanding the model adopted by the United States toinclude China, North Korea, Japan, and South Korea.

3

Embrace a rescoping of extended deterrence dialogues with the US
to encompass reassurance and nuclear-risk reduction measures.

4

Support efforts to elevate the CTBT, including a principle of“no-first test.”

5

Promote a region-wide (including the US) halt to further
development of intermediate-range ground launched missiles.

6

Support the US Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, andencourage China and North Korea to adopt similar legislation.

7

Move toward a nuclear-weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia by
negotiating a monitored, mutual ban on nuclear weapons within the
Exclusive Economic Zones (200 nautical miles) of the Korean
Peninsula’s coastlines.

8

Support a freeze of advanced conventional weapons and reallocate
2% of the defense budget saved to UN programs; lobby Northeast
Asian governments to do the same.

9

Commit to a “No Leadership Assassinations and No Forced Regime
Change” pledge.

10

Support development of a region-wide missile launch
notification regime.

11

Invest in research on non-offensive defense strategic thinking.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe54

WE CALL ON THE UNITED STATES TO:

1

Declare an end to the Korean War and a willingness to live in mutual co-existence with
China and North Korea, as well as publicly recognize the condition of mutual
vulnerability that exists with both states’ nuclear forces.

2

Propose a no-first use nuclear dialogue with China.

3

Codify the US moratorium on ASAT testing and continue supporting efforts tomultilateralize the moratorium.

4

Issue a “No Nuclear Deployment” executive order instructing US forces to refrainfrom nuclear deployments to the Korean peninsula except by presidential direction.

5

Introduce end-use restrictions on the sale and transfer of precision-guided munitions(missiles and unmanned systems).

6

Lobby the congress to pass the US Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, andencourage China and North Korea to adopt similar legislation.

7

Defund the nuclear variant of the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile (SLCM-N), which
introduces heightened nuclear risks without an adequate deterrence benefit.

8

Begin a strategic security dialogue with North Korea.

9

Propose rescoping extended deterrence dialogues with Japan and South Korea toencompass reassurance and nuclear-risk reduction measures.

10

Halt development of ground-based, intermediate-range missiles and encourage all
Northeast Asian governments to do the same.

11

Negotiate a ban on low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons with China & North Korea.

12

Negotiate a “no-dead-hand” (fail deadly) nuclear restriction with China & North Korea.

13

Issue an executive order expressing the intent to ratify the CTBT and directing US
compliance until then; support Northeast Asian efforts to elevate the CTBT, including
a principle of ‘no first test.’

14

Move toward a nuclear-weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia by negotiating amonitored, mutual ban on nuclear weapons within the Exclusive Economic Zones(200 nautical miles) of the Korean Peninsula’s coastlines.

15

Support a freeze of advanced conventional weapons and reallocate 2% of the
defense budget saved to UN programs; lobby Northeast Asian governments to do
the same.

16

Commit to a “No Leadership Assassinations and No Forced Regime Change” pledge.

17

Support development of a region-wide missile launch notification regime.

18

Invest in research on non-offensive defense strategic thinking.
What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe55

WE CALL ON CHINA TO:

1

Provide transparency about the full capacity of China’s nuclear
inventory, including warhead numbers, silos, and fissile material.

2

Participate in a no-first use nuclear dialogue with theUnited States.

3

Participate in a moratorium on ASAT testing, expanding the model
adopted by the United States to include China, North Korea, Japan,
and South Korea.

4

Participate in a region-wide (including the US) halt to further
development of intermediate-range ground launched missiles.

5

Negotiate a ban on low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons with theUnited States and North Korea.

6

Negotiate a “no-dead-hand” (fail deadly) nuclear restriction with theUnited States and North Korea.

7

Support efforts to elevate the CTBT, including a principle of“no-first test.”

8

Move toward a nuclear-weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia by
negotiating a monitored, mutual ban on nuclear weapons within the
Exclusive Economic Zones (200 nautical miles) of the Korean
Peninsula’s coastlines.

9

Support a freeze of advanced conventional weapons and reallocate
2% of the defense budget saved to UN programs; lobby Northeast
Asian governments to do the same.

10

Commit to a “No Leadership Assassinations and No Forced Regime
Change” pledge.

11

Support development of a region-wide missile launch
notification regime.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe56

WE CALL ON NORTH KOREA TO:

1

Begin a strategic security dialogue with the United States.

2

Provide transparency about the full capacity of North Korea’s nuclear
inventory, including warhead numbers, silos, and fissile material.

3

Halt development of ground-based, intermediate-range missilesand encourage all Northeast Asian governments to do the same.

4

Negotiate a ban on low-yield “tactical” nuclear weapons with theUnited States and China.

5

Negotiate a “no-dead-hand” (fail deadly) nuclear restriction with
China and the United States.

6

Support efforts to elevate the CTBT, including a principle of“no-first test.”

7

Move toward a nuclear-weapons-free zone in Northeast Asia by
negotiating a monitored, mutual ban on nuclear weapons within the
Exclusive Economic Zones (200 nautical miles) of the Korean
Peninsula’s coastlines.

8

Support a freeze of advanced conventional weapons and reallocate
2% of the defense budget to economic development.

9

Commit to a “No Leadership Assassinations and No Forced
Regime Change” pledge.

10

Participate in the development of a region-wide missile launch
notification regime.

What Should Be Done? Practical Policies to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

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The Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN) isa Seoul-based organisation and network of political, military, and diplomatic leaders and experts
from across the Asia-Pacific region working to address global security challenges, with a particularfocus on reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons risks.
The mission of APLN is to inform and stimulate debate, influence action, and propose policy
recommendations designed to address regional security threats, with an emphasis on nuclear andother WMD (weapon of mass destruction) threats, and to do everything possible to achieve a worldin which nuclear weapons and other WMDs are contained, diminished, and eventually eliminated.

apln.network@APLNofficial@APLNofficial@APLNofficial

Nagasaki University is the only university in the world that has inherited a medical college having
experienced the atomic bombing. Achieving a “world free from nuclear weapons” is thus a paramountconcern to the University. Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University (RECNA),
located in a city that was attacked by an atomic bomb, is an educational and research institute whichis the interdisciplinary center of local academia with a firsthand experience of the horror of nuclear
weapons. Founded in 2012, its objectives encompass a twofold mission: firstly, through rigorous
academic inquiry and analysis, to redefine the significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki experiences in thelight of the current world trend, and disseminate information and make proposals from various aspects
towards abolishing nuclear weapons; secondly, to make best use of such a process and outcomes of its
research and analysis, and contribute to university education. RECNA, as a think tank open to the local
community longing for nuclear weapons abolition, operates in close cooperation with partners including
Nagasaki City and Nagasaki Prefecture.

RECNA

RECNA

@recna2012

recna_nu

Since its founding in 1992, the Nautilus Institute has evolved into a thriving public policy think-tank andcommunity resource. Along the way it has addressed critical security and sustainability issues such as
US nuclear policy, especially in Korea, energy insecurity in Northeast Asia, and the effect of the U.S.China relationship on environmental insecurity. The Institute has built a reputation not only for innovative
research and analysis of critical global problems, it also translates ideas into practical solutions, oftenwith high impact. Nautilus Institute holds that the key to reducing global insecurity-in short, to making
the world peaceful, equitable, and sustainable-lies in the creation of a global civil society committed
to joint problem-solving. The Nautilus community is a global network built around this strategy serving
thousands of people in over fifty countries and working with partners in every country in the region.

nautilus.org

What
Should Be InstituteDone? Practical Policies
to Prevent Nuclear
Nautilus InstituteNautilus@Nautilus
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