This is a difficult time to be talking about disarmament or even arms control. The geopolitical context is about as unhelpful as it could possibly be and it is hard to imagine circumstances in which the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is ratified by all the world’s states. And yet, talking about disarmament and imagining a nuclear-free world is what I do in an article newly published by the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. To make a challenging ask yet more demanding, my argument is that we – humankind – need a new order that will guard not only against the existential nuclear threat but also against the dangers arising from severe ecological disruption.  

What follows is a short version distilled from the first draft of the article. Among other things, it leaves out some of the political philosophy. For the full version, follow the link.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow

The present period is often compared with the 1930s – political polarisation on the rise, expectations of prosperity slowing down, conflicts and military spending on the increase, confrontation growing, and so gloomily on. But events do not always move in an expected and consistent direction. In the 1930s, it’s unlikely many people (if any) foresaw the foundation of the UN and the array of agreements and treaties in the 1940s and 1950s for human rights, to ban genocide and protecting refugees. 

Of course, that breakthrough to a new world order came after a war in which 60-85 million people died and nuclear weapons were used for the first time. The challenge today is to transition to a new and peaceable order without the impetus of global war. Fortunately, history does not precisely repeat itself and a comparison of the 2020s and the 1930s reveals not only similarities and parallels but also significant differences.

If it is not impossible that a transition to a new world order could occur, how are we to envisage it? Two of the many differences between now and the 1930s are that nuclear weapons exist and that ecological disruption is profound. So a new world order must be fit for purpose in the Anthropocene epoch, the period of history we have entered in which human activity is the most decisive force shaping the natural world.

Ecological realities vs security agendas

Part of the challenge we face is that, almost everywhere, there is a mismatch between security agendas andecological realities. This is despite an increasing recognition that ecological sustainability is a basic requirement for security, as shown by NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023, the EU environment agency’s five-yearly report and a German foreign ministry report both published in 2025, as well as a UK national security assessment published in the first few weeks of 2026. The insight, in short, is not controversial but acting upon it is almost wholly lacking.

There are many reasons why. One is that, if ecological sustainability is a part of security policy, it is hard to see how nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence can also fit in. The willingness to unleash destruction on that scale, even in retaliation, is hard to square with a commitment to ecological sustainability. It is a fundamental conceptual incompatibility. Of course, a nuclear-armed state can be responsive to some extent to the requirements of ecological sustainability but that is a compromise, not a resolution of the underlying contradiction.

World order (again)

As we discuss world order, as I do a lot, it is troublingly clear that the order we have known since the 1940s is effectively over. In Ukraine, against Gaza, Iran and Venezuela, in the East Asian seas, and in the Horn of Africa, the great powers show a willingness to go beyond the lines of what used to be the limits of acceptable international behaviour. This trend in grand strategy and high politics is reflected at ground level in the increasing lack of restraint in how violent conflict is conducted. A recent comprehensive report on armed conflicts concludes that international humanitarian law has arrived at breaking point.

At every level, rules that were once bent or circumvented are now simply broken. 

Our global institutions have served us well but today are unable to manage conflict, prevent militarization or handle the ecological crisis. 

To clarify, decisions at the level of world order, such as more ambitious environmental treaties with better implementation and enforcement mechanisms, will not resolve the ecological crisis alone. The causes of the ecological crisis lie in our predominant economic models and that is where ecological sustainability must also be rooted, in changing business as usual. But international agreement and regulation can provide both a framework and incentives and prevent backsliding. 

For the Anthropocene epoch, the world needs different goals and mechanisms of rule-making and enforcement. The aim must be to get to a better balance between humankind and nature, which begins in part by recognising that we are part of nature. This philosophical recognition of our connectedness with nature could also underpin a clearer sense of our connectedness with each other. While it is impossible to look at today’s world and think it would be easy to make this transition in thought, policy and deed – neither in the human relationship with nature nor in our international relations – there is much to be gained by thinking it through.

International relations today are governed by the assumption that, as the theorist Hans J. Morgenthau put it, ‘International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power’.^[1] This is old fashioned Realism. When its niceties are torn away by leaders such as Putin and Trump, it becomes a matter of bluntly asserting the supremacy of force. The world built on those foundations is one in which, in words that the Greek historian Thucydides put into the mouth of an Athenian diplomat (and which I keep on quoting in post after post because I think it so eloquently depicts the Putin-Trump world),

“(T)he strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” 

Order = cooperation

Today, the peril of basing national policy on self-interest is both that it disregards humankind’s dependence on the biosphere, and because weapons that are seen as the supreme instruments of power and security – nuclear weapons – pose an existential threat. They are so powerful as to be essentially useless for any rational purpose. There is no scenario in which using them makes sense. Instruments developed in the name of the national interest and of security only undermine the national interest and generate insecurity.

Pitted against the outmoded pretensions of realism, today, preserving the ecosphere, including the biosphere of which we are part, has emerged as a core national interest. To act on that interest requires cooperation. Similarly, not simply avoiding nuclear disaster but going further and putting it away reliably and forever also requires cooperation. 

That is straightforward enough but what is more demanding when it comes to thinking about policy is that in both cases, the cooperation that is required is at a deeper level than what has been achieved in the current world order. 

One reason for this is that the knowledge of how to manufacture nuclear weapons exists; managing a nuclear-free world in a nuclear-knowing context will require the ability to spot early signs of illicit technology development, wherever they appear. A second reason is that the negative consequences of the normal functioning of modern societies are felt across national borders. Monitoring, regulating and ensuring compliance with limits will be significantly intrusive, requiring agreement to surrender some of what are seen as the attributes of sovereignty.

A multiplex approach

The history of environmental agreements persistently reveals a small minority of governments getting undue leverage in the final stages of negotiation and winning concessions that delay action and dilute the substance. Aiming for universal agreement is important but should not be a sacrosanct principle. If the agreement that all will sign is inadequate, it would be more effective to get agreement from 80 percent on something real. 

This is a multiplex approach, which means it is diverse and composed of distinct, interleaved parts. It acknowledges that, today, most powers (Russia and the USA are the major exceptions) recognise some issues on which cooperation is key but do not all agree on everything. Thus, coalitions will vary per issue. Accepting that as an operating mode will mean achievements can be registered without being universal. Success may attract more adherents, so coalitions grow and new possibilities emerge. 

However far such an approach can take us towards the desired world order, its great advantage is that it embraces the reality that the key element of security in the Anthropocene is cooperation. While rivalries and contestations will remain, security will not be achieved by pursuing them. That is the new realism and the founding assumption for a new international order, whatever shape it ultimately takes.

---

^[1] Morgenthau, H. J., Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 4th edn (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1968), p. 25.