Every so often a new invention enters the battle space and changes the face of war. The longbow, the Gatling gun, the battle tank and – of course – the nuclear bomb. The first to have it leads the military revolution of its day.
As we saw again over the weekend, drones – and the ability to counter them – may well be the next great revolution. Indeed, the character of conflict is about to enter a new chapter with the introduction of Dragonfire: the first laser weapon capable of downing a drone or missile.
Yet this still remains the nuclear age. The fact that Iran – not yet a nuclear power – can see its missiles shot down by Western forces, whereas Russia – armed with nukes – faces no such repercussions from its barbaric assaults on civilian targets, is extremely revealing. It sends a dark message to the West’s enemies: that if you acquire nuclear weapons, no one will dare touch you.
From this simple discovery, we may begin to see the gradual demise of our global order. The ever-louder debate calling for increased defence spending in response to our increasingly fragmented world is symbolic of this shift, with a new competing axis of China, Russia and Iran increasingly testing the West’s appetite and ability to defend the international rules-based order.
The world is not yet at war. But the relative peace that we enjoyed since the end of the last Cold War has gone. State-on-state aggression is back.
My fear, though, is that we are in a Cold War far more complex and dangerous than the last. Then we had back channels, treaties and wise statecraft to prevent it turning hot. It contained a nuclear arms race to ensure no nuclear weapon, large or small, would ever be deployed.
Those days are over. The back channels have gone, the treaties have lapsed, and the determination of dictators like Putin not to lose (believing the West will not respond) means a nuclear weapon will, in my view, be fired within the next decade. It may not come from an unexpected source – a country that has nearly acquired one, or a terrorist faction within a state – but the danger is very real.
Whilst Ukraine, the Middle East and the fate of Taiwan dominate the headlines, a nuclear arms race has been developing under our noses. Right now, the West has no coherent strategy to deal with the fact that our enemies are rearming with a lethality that people simply don’t comprehend.
Russia, for example, has dramatically increased its tactical nuclear arsenal to about 2,000 weapons, seeking once again to gain equilibrium with the United States. Putin has not only modernised but expanded his nuclear forces across all platforms, enhancing both short and long-range capabilities, including those tactical low-yield nuclear weapons.
China too has embarked on the world’s largest nuclear force expansion in decades under President Xi Jinping: from 300 warheads in 2019 to 1,000 by the end of the decade. This build-up is shrouded in opacity, with China refusing any form of transparency and verification. Xi uses this growing nuclear capability to bolster his aggressive posturing towards neighbouring territories and the broader South China Sea, intensifying regional tensions and global stakes.
There is little to stop this. Unlike during the Cold War, where mutual assured destruction (MAD) and robust treaty frameworks held nuclear ambitions in check, today’s landscape is starkly different. During the Cold War, even amidst high tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union managed to negotiate critical arms control agreements. Today just one agreement (the New START treaty) which limits U.S and Russian intercontinental nuclear warheads technically remains, but is set to expire in early 2026, and Russia has suspended its participation.
There is no doubt now that this evolving Russia-China axis presents a real and present danger. The West’s current grand strategy, let alone its nuclear arsenal, cannot compute this threat. The conversation about nuclear risk, often shunned, must become a centrepiece of international discourse, for ignoring it does not diminish the threat but rather diminishes our capacity to address it effectively. Otherwise, as Churchill warned: “we go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.”
This all underlines why defence spending must increase, our grand strategy updated and our military empowered. Before any MoD budget is increased, let’s conduct a review of the full spectrum of threats so as to better appreciate how our defence posture should grow.
After seven decades of ensuring their numbers were limited and their deployment avoided, we must come to terms with a world where a nuclear bomb could indeed be fired in anger.
Tobias Ellwood is a former Foreign Office and Defence minister
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