Contested Nuclear Taboo in the Third Nuclear Age

Over the past decade, we have seen growing concerns that the renewed great power competition and the increasing salience of nuclear weapons in world politics could eventually lead to the erosion of the international norm against nuclear use—the “nuclear taboo.” The most prominent development widely seen as damaging to the nuclear taboo has been Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a military campaign accompanied by the Kremlin’s nuclear saber-rattling and persistent Western concerns about nuclear escalation. In his new book, Michal Smetana presents the argument that while intense Russian nuclear signaling and other patterns of irresponsible nuclear behavior have opened the “contestation space” with respect to the validity and meaning of the nuclear nonuse norm, they are by themselves poor indicators of the erosion of the nuclear taboo.

Host or Publisher Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies