How Has Vladimir Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine Upended the World Nuclear Order?

Longtime Corporation grantee Siegfried Hecker, one of the world’s foremost nuclear security and policy experts, offers his perspective on how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is as momentous for nuclear affairs as was the dissolution of the Soviet Union

By Carnegie Corporation of New York April 29, 2022

Nuclear Threats

Peace activists wear masks of Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and U.S. President Joe Biden with mock nuclear missiles in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate on January 29, 2021, in a call to action for more progress in nuclear disarmament. (Credit: John MacDougall/ AFP via Getty Images)

How has Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine upended the world nuclear order?

Longtime Carnegie Corporation of New York grantee Siegfried Hecker, one of the world’s foremost nuclear security and policy experts, offers his perspective on how Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is as momentous for nuclear affairs as the dissolution of the Soviet Union in a recent interview with John Mecklin, editor-in-chief of Corporation grantee the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

According to Hecker, Putin has “blown up the global nuclear order that has been developed over the last 70 years, for the most part by the United States and Russia.” The emeritus fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, added, “I see that order being destroyed by what Putin has done in Ukraine, every facet — from nuclear deterrence, to nonproliferation, to the prevention of nuclear terrorism, and the future of nuclear power.”

In the interview, Hecker provides his perspective on Putin’s intentions, the war’s disastrous effect on Russia’s nuclear power industry – one of its biggest high-tech exports – and the real possibility of the use of nuclear weapons that has returned to the forefront of public consciousness for the first time in decades. “Whereas before I would have thought the likelihood of Russia using nuclear weapons was basically zero, I no longer consider it zero, though it’s still low,” said Hecker.

The prior global nuclear order was based on nuclear nonproliferation as its central element with Russia playing a central role in an international system involving other agreements, practices, and norms of cooperation. With a formerly responsible nuclear state that is still actively involved in the nuclear arena now an outcast in the international community, how should democracies respond? “More than anything, what has to drive our thinking is we must avoid a strategic nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States that could eventually imperil the world as we know it,” said Hecker.

With a new standoff between Western democracies and autocracies like Russia and China, Hecker says there is a need to re-envision nuclear cooperation as well as to strengthen democracies worldwide.

“What Ukraine showed is that such autocracies are willing to conduct a brutal, totally unprovoked invasion,” said Hecker. “How in the world do we get out of this? The two most important things, in my opinion are, first, that democracies must work together. That’s one of the bright spots of the invasion of Ukraine. It has brought the Western democracies back together …. The second element, which may actually be more important, is how we fix our own democracy in this country. If we’re going to be the democracy that the rest of the world looks up to, we need to fix the deep political divisions that greatly weaken America.”

Read the full interview Siegfried Hecker: Putin Has Destroyed the World Nuclear Order. How Should the Democracies Respond?