Nuclear-Pandemic Nexus Scenarios

Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament

This issue of J-PAND presents the expert papers commissioned to support the virtual nuclear-pandemic nexus scenarios workshop in 2020. The editors believe that a transformation of the structures of international relations and the distribution of power caused by the pandemic may be underway. The resulting implications for nuclear weapons, for nuclear arms control and risk reduction, and for nuclear disarmament could be profound. This conclusion made it imperative to investigate how the pandemic might affect nuclear risk and disarmament and led to the commissioning of the fifteen specialist papers included in this special issue.

Each paper presents in depth a critical issue that the fifty scenarios participants needed to know about, including the nature of pandemics, the link between nuclear weapons and other existential threats such as climate change, the impacts of this pandemic on conventional and nuclear militaries, the status of nuclear weapons in the East Asia region, nuclear risk reduction measures such as modernized hotlines, etc. As Moon Chung-in–one of the authors of the essays in this collection–stated, the pandemic makes it imperative to “conjugate” these separate knowledge domains in ways rarely attempted by scholars or policy practitioners. It followed that our response must be cross-disciplinary and multi-sectoral in nature. We hope this volume serves that purpose.

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