Pandemics increase the risk of nuclear war

The relationship between pandemics and war is as long as human history. Past pandemics have set the scene for wars by weakening societies, undermining resilience, and exacerbating civil and inter-state conflict. Other disease outbreaks have erupted during wars, in part due to the appalling public health and battlefield conditions resulting from war, in turn sowing the seeds for new conflicts. In the post-Cold War era, pandemics have spread with unprecedented speed due to increased mobility created by globalization, especially between urbanized areas. Although there are positive signs that scientific advances and rapid innovation can help us manage pandemics, it is likely that deadly infectious viruses will be a challenge for years to come.

The COVID-19 is the most demonic pandemic threat in modern history. It has erupted at a juncture of other existential global threats, most importantly, accelerating climate change and resurgent nuclear threat-making. The most important issue, therefore, is how the coronavirus (and future pandemics) will increase or decrease the risks associated with these twin threats, climate change effects, and the next use of nuclear weapons in war.Footnote5

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic is clearly driving massive, rapid, and unpredictable changes that will redefine every aspect of the human condition, including WMD – just as the world wars of the first half of the 20th century led to a revolution in international affairs and entirely new ways of organizing societies, economies, and international relations, in part based on nuclear weapons and their threatened use. In a world reshaped by pandemics, nuclear weapons – as well as correlated non-nuclear WMD, nuclear alliances, “deterrence” doctrines, operational and declaratory policies, nuclear extended deterrence, organizational practices, and the existential risks posed by retaining these capabilities – are all up for redefinition.

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.