COVID is an impact magnifier — sustaining a signal of economic recovery is key to avert nuclear war.

Today, the nine nuclear weapons arsenals not only can annihilate hundreds of cities, but also cause nuclear winter and mass starvation of a billion or more people, if not the entire human species. Concurrently, climate change is enveloping the planet with more frequent and intense storms, accelerating sea level rise, and advancing rapid ecological change, expressed in unprecedented forest fires across the world. Already stretched to a breaking point in many countries, the current pandemic may overcome resilience to the point of near or actual collapse of social, economic, and political order.

In this extraordinary moment, it is timely to reflect on the existence and possible uses of weapons of mass destruction under pandemic conditions – most importantly, nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons. Moments of extreme crisis and vulnerability can prompt aggressive and counterintuitive actions that in turn may destabilize already precariously balanced threat systems, underpinned by conventional and nuclear weapons, as well as the threat of weaponized chemical and biological technologies. Consequently, the risk of the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), especially nuclear weapons, increases at such times, possibly sharply.

A pandemic has potential to destabilize a nuclear-prone conflict by incapacitating the supreme nuclear commander or commanders who have to issue nuclear strike orders, creating uncertainty as to who is in charge, how to handle nuclear mistakes (such as errors, accidents, technological failures, and entanglement with conventional operations gone awry), and opening a brief opportunity for a first strike at a time when the COVID-infected state may not be able to retaliate efficiently – or at all – due to leadership confusion. In some nuclear-laden conflicts, a state might use a pandemic as a cover for political or military provocations in the belief that the adversary is distracted and partly disabled by the pandemic, increasing the risk of war in a nuclear-prone conflict. At the same time, a pandemic may lead nuclear armed states to increase the isolation and sanctions against a nuclear adversary, making it even harder to stop the spread of the disease, in turn creating a pandemic reservoir and transmission risk back to the nuclear armed state or its allies.

In principle, the common threat of the pandemic might induce nuclear-armed states to reduce the tension in a nuclear-prone conflict and thereby the risk of nuclear war. It may cause nuclear adversaries or their umbrella states to seek to resolve conflicts in a cooperative and collaborative manner by creating habits of communication, engagement, and mutual learning that come into play in the nuclear-military sphere. For example, militaries may cooperate to control pandemic transmission, including by working together against criminal-terrorist non-state actors that are trafficking people or by joining forces to ensure that a new pathogen is not developed as a bioweapon.

To date, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the isolation of some nuclear-armed states and provided a textbook case of the failure of states to cooperate to overcome the pandemic. Borders have slammed shut, trade shut down, and budgets blown out, creating enormous pressure to focus on immediate domestic priorities. Foreign policies have become markedly more nationalistic. Dependence on nuclear weapons may increase as states seek to buttress a global re-spatialization6 of all dimensions of human interaction at all levels to manage pandemics. The effect of nuclear threats on leaders may make it less likely – or even impossible – to achieve the kind of concert at a global level needed to respond to and administer an effective vaccine, making it harder and even impossible to revert to pre-pandemic international relations. The result is that some states may proliferate their own nuclear weapons, further reinforcing the spiral of conflicts contained by nuclear threat, with cascading effects on the risk of nuclear war

Developing Pandemic-nuclear Nexus Scenarios

How might the COVID-19 pandemic (and future pandemics) create new opportunities or challenges for governments, civil society, and market actors to reduce nuclear risk and resume nuclear disarmament? And how might those challenges and opportunities emerge in Northeast Asia, in particular?

In the face of so much uncertainty, a powerful way to obtain navigational guidance and to develop robust strategies is to conduct scenario-based dialogues. Scenarios may be underpinned by analysis, but they rest primarily on eliciting diverse insights through a dialogic process (typically a workshop) that explores the multiple, powerful drivers of complex problems and possible strategies to resolve such problems. Rather than predict any specific future, the goal of developing scenarios is to prepare individuals and organizations for radically divergent, possible futures.

A scenario is a tool for ordering one’s perceptions about alternative future environments in which today’s decisions might play out. In practice, scenarios resemble a set of stories built around carefully constructed plots. These stories can express multiple perspectives on complex events and give multiple meaning to these events.

The development of such scenarios was the primary goal of the Nagasaki 75th Anniversary Pandemic-Nuclear Nexus Scenarios workshop. Through this project, we wanted to develop an analytic understanding of the interrelated nature of nuclear weapons and global pandemics. We wanted to explore the potential levers and pathways to influence the future. And we wanted to find concrete strategies to reduce the risk of nuclear war and resume disarmament, particularly novel approaches that could engage both state and non-state actors

Shaping the Focal Question

At the outset of the Pandemic-Nuclear Nexus Scenarios Project, the organizers framed a focal question that would guide the development of the scenarios:

What are the opportunities driven by global pandemics for Northeast Asian governments, civil society, and market actors to reduce nuclear risk and resume nuclear disarmament?

This focal question has twin normative values in it: (a) how to reduce the risk of nuclear war arising from the pandemic and (b) how to resume nuclear disarmament under pandemic conditions. Measures to realize (a) might be in opposition to measures to realize (b). They might be independent, or they might be complementary. Discovering opportunities where the measures are synergistic has the highest value; avoiding contradictory measures might be critically important. But forced to choose, we likely must go first and foremost with measures to reduce the risk of nuclear war, as disarmament becomes moot and improbable if nuclear war occurs.

As in any scenarios event, we sought to identify robust strategies that could work across the divergent, uncertainty-based scenarios and move each story line toward a higher probability of realizing these two strategic goals. We were particularly interested in prompting discussion on the role of cities as potential new players with regard to nuclear war risk reduction. The challenges of “global nuclear governance” and nuclear disarmament have traditionally been dominated by great powers (that is, nation-states). But given their evident and emerging leading role as “first responders” to the existential threats of the coronavirus pandemic and climate change effects, we wanted to see how cities’ capacity and experience may be useful in relation to nuclear risk and disarmament.

The focal question also centers on Northeast Asia, a region that was the site of the first use of nuclear weapons (in Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and that today has thousands of cities, as well as potential for conflict on multiple fronts, including between China and Taiwan, China and the United States, and the ROK and DPRK. Northeast Asia sits at the nexus of relations between the world’s three largest nuclear armed states (China, Russia, and the United States), and it is home to the DPRK, a rapidly developing new nucleararmed state.

Identifying Critical Uncertainties

In the first phase of the scenario development process, participants were divided into four groups where they brainstormed a broad range of “critical uncertainties,” variables whose outcomes are both undetermined and important for shaping the near- and long-term future. Participants were asked to consider uncertainties based on different categories (social, technological, environmental, economic, political, military, and epidemiological).

Through their initial brainstorm, groups developed a list of dozens of critical uncertainties (see Appendix 2). They were asked to narrow down their lists of uncertainties to those most likely to play a major role in shaping the pandemic-nuclear nexus. They then considered how these uncertainties could unfold along an axis with two diverging outcomes. Following are a few of the drivers participants identified:

How might a distanced society affect nuclear strategies? On one end of the spectrum, for example, re-spatialization could lead to greater cooperation as people work across borders, physical and virtual. On the other end, the need to maintain distance could lead to shifts in militaries’ offshore strategies for deterrence/military projection of might and could potentially lead to the increased use of non-conventional (including nuclear) weapons.

How will changes in budgets affect dis/armament? The economic recession caused by the pandemic could lead to drastic cuts in funding for the military, including for nuclear weapons. On the other hand, countries’ economic struggles could lead them to increasingly favor investing in nuclear, as opposed to higher-cost conventional weapons.

How might pandemics affect global cooperation? The COVID-19 pandemic could serve as an impetus for increased international cooperation and the sharing of global information, which could extend to other areas, including nuclear. On the other hand, questions over the origin of the virus, border closures, and “vaccine competition” could lead to a rise in tensions.

How will information sharing evolve? The proliferation of misinformation through diverse media channels (including social media) could erode progress in tackling shared global challenges. Or new systems could emerge that help ensure that information is shared with a high level of transparency and be verified as accurate.

Will inequality increase or decrease? Following the economic recession caused by shutdowns aimed at limiting the pandemic, the gap could continue to grow between (and within) societies regarding economic well-being and human health. Or the pandemic may usher in a more redistributive economic system that leads to a decrease in inequality.