Emerging and rogue-state nuclear weapons programs like those of North Korea and Iran may capture all the headlines, but as Henry Sokolski explains in Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future, proliferation makes traditional concerns of global nuclear security ever more pressing. A poly-nuclear world – multiple actors equipped with potentially catastrophic arsenals – is a world in which the kind of strategic miscalculation that so preoccupied military and political leaders in Washington and Moscow during the Cold War becomes even more likely and worrisome.
Of course, a disastrous nuclear war “by mistake” doesn’t have to happen. It didn’t during the Cold War, and it needn’t in the future, either. However, Sokolski, Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, argues that if we are to have any hope of solving future proliferation problems, we will have to act in a timely fashion than we have to date.
On June 19, Hudson Institute hosted a lunchtime panel on the future of international nuclear strategy with Henry Sokolski, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Lee Smith, Tod Lindberg, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Dov Zakheim, former Under Secretary of Defense and Senior Fellow at CNA Analysis and Solutions.
Free copies of Underestimated were available.
