Russia was warning Ukraine’s supporters, of course. But Moscow’s decision to lower the nuclear threshold and its 2023 decision to withdraw from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) which bans all nuclear explosions, and a series of other developments suggest that the world has entered the age of nuclear adventurism. Apart from the Russian decisions, four other factors are responsible for this state of global nuclear adventurism.

To begin with, the once-dominant optimistic narratives and global summits and conversations about nuclear disarmament, nuclear energy, nuclear security, nuclear CBMs, and non-proliferation have all but vanished from the global nuclear consciousness. Despite the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, there is no compelling narrative today about nuclear challenges except the growing fear of potential nuclear use. Historically, the global nuclear debate has evolved from the horrors of nuclear weapons in the wake of their use in Japan to calls for abolition, moving to non-proliferation from the 1960s onwards, nuclear security in the 2000s, and counter-proliferation in the 2010s. Today, the debate has come full circle — back to the fears of nuclear use.

The second feature of the current nuclear disorder is the sheer absence of great power consensus on nuclear issues. At a time when there are fears of proliferation and nuclear use and growing conflicts around the world, there is no appetite for any serious conversations on nuclear issues at any level. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is dead, the Cold War era Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty has been abandoned, the New START Treaty is suspended, and Russia and the United States seem to be in no mood to talk about strategic stability. Perhaps the most conducive atmosphere for building nuclear weapons is now — and those States desirous of doing it know it too well.

The third feature of the global nuclear disorder is the deep institutional decay that has set in the global non-proliferation order. The institutions undergirding the nuclear order, in particular the International Atomic Energy Agency, are resource-poor, and becoming irrelevant, unable to move forward. In an age where countries declare the UN chief as persona non grata, what hope do IAEA inspectors have? At a time when we need to focus on energy transition, there is little conversation on how to make nuclear energy affordable or accessible to the developing world. Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Review Conferences hardly achieve anything and the Conference on Disarmament is stuck in a time capsule some three decades ago.

The fourth and most significant feature is the rising belief that nukes provide States with security guarantees. One key lesson many states are drawing from the Russia-Ukraine war is that a nuclear-armed Ukraine would have been better off. There is an eerie sense in South Asia that we did the right thing in 1998 by going nuclear and braving the sanctions that came with it. Another lesson that weaker States may be drawing from the ongoing conflicts is that nuclear-armed States can attack non-nuclear States at will and may even be able to get away with it.

If those are the lessons that countries are assimilating, do weaker powers have the incentive to denuclearise at all in an unstable global nuclear order? Or, for that matter, does any State — big or small — have any incentive to denuclearise? The question many non-nuclear weapon States are already asking is: Why should only the nuclear weapon States have the luxury of security and be able to threaten non-nuclear States as and when they want to?

For instance, South Korea. There is today a growing debate there about the utility of nuclear weapons to deter China and North Korea, a feeling further reinforced by the growing partnership between Russia and North Korea. If you dig deeper, you will see that nuclear temptations are growing in Seoul. South Korea has already test-fired submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Once its KSS-III programme is complete, it will be able to launch a total of 78 SLBMs from the KSS-III submarine. This means that Seoul has the delivery vehicle for nuclear weapons as well as the technology to develop nuclear warheads — and perhaps a permissive environment.

The disruptive lessons from the Ukraine war are likely to inspire strategists in countries across the world to look at the nuclear option more seriously. So far, the conclusion that many of them are reaching is what Kenneth Watz, the father of the modern (neo)realist theory, had reached more than a decade ago: Slow spread of nuclear weapons may be better for international stability. While I am not entirely convinced by the Waltzian logic, what is clear is that the current international environment is quite conducive to nuclear adventurism.

Happymon Jacob teaches India’s foreign policy at JNU and is the founder of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research. The views expressed are personal