ABSTRACT
Introduction The potential spread of nuclear weapons among states in Asia is a major threat to regional and global peace and security in the present century. Nuclear proliferation in Asia not only raises the probability and cost of wars among states, but it could also make nuclear materials available to terrorists or other non-state actors with grievances aplenty and bad manners. In addition, nuclear turbulence in Asia is a back door to the reawakening of instability in Europe, otherwise politically and militarily stable. In this chapter, we conjecture by means of a “thought experiment” about a possible, but not inevitable, nuclear future in Asia. We project to the year 2020 or shortly thereafter: into the second or third decade of the twenty-first century. Are deterrence stability, crisis stability, and arms race stability even conceivable, let alone possible, in a multipolar nuclear Asia? The political context of an Asian nuclear arms race is obviously different from the political context that surrounded U.S.–Soviet competition throughout the Cold War. Therefore, the consequences of variations in the performances of various forces may be more significant for crisis and arms race stability in an eight-sided arms competition than in the two-way street of the Cold War.
