In recent weeks, Ukraine has been striking targets deep inside Russia with large-scale drone attacks and long-range missiles. Some commentators in Western media have hailed Ukraine for beginning to turn the tide. Whether that turns out to be correct, we can only wait and see. The momentum in wars can swing back and forth.
But one thing this does reveal is that Ukraine is not being deterred by Russia’s nuclear arsenal. It has even attacked Russian nuclear bombers and early warning systems. Yet Moscow has not—thankfully—responded with nuclear weapons.
Speaking in 1946, the Chinese revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong, called nuclear weapons a “paper tiger,” arguing that they could not be used to fight a war to dominate other nations because they would destroy the very thing the aggressor wanted to control. Mao later endorsed the development of a Chinese bomb, but seen through the lens of current events, his original assessment was spot on.
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Even policy experts who have believed in deterrence doctrine are now openly questioning it. In a recent essay in the journal Foreign Affairs, former U.S. and NATO official Rose Gottermoeller wrote an article called The Strange Defeat of Nuclear Deterrence that argued that “Countries have long assumed that the possession of nuclear weapons was the surest guarantee of their security,” but Ukraine’s attacks on Russia show deterrence is not working.
Gottermoeller attributes this failure to the changing nature of war, but history shows how nuclear weapons have consistently failed to deter. In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. In 1982, Argentina briefly seized the Falkland/Malvinas Islands from the UK. Vietnam was not intimidated by the U.S. nuclear arsenal in their long war. Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan launched conventional attacks on each other in 1999 and 2025.
When the world came the closest we are aware of to nuclear war in the Cuban crisis of 1962, it was not deterrence that prevented a nuclear conflagration, it was “sheer, dumb luck,” in the words of former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
The attack by nuclear-armed Israel and the U.S. on Iran is another reminder that deterrence does not work as predicted by the neat theorizations of deterrence doctrine.
Tehran has not been deterred from striking back, launching conventionally-armed ballistic missiles and drones against Israel and U.S. bases in the Gulf States and Jordan. It has also used its conventional forces to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz and forced the U.S. to return to the negotiating table, despite President Trump’s apparent nuclear threat to end Iranian civilization in a night. As for Israel, it has relied on missile defense, not nuclear threats, against Iran’s counter attacks.
What the behavior of Russia, the U.S. and Israel seems to reveal about nuclear weapons is something supporters of deterrence doctrine do not talk about. Namely, that nuclear-armed countries seem to feel emboldened to flout international law, act aggressively and attack other countries with their conventional forces.
While advocates of nuclear deterrence assert that it enhances global stability and inhibits conflict, the opposite seems to be true, evidenced by the global knock-on effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S./Israel war on Iran—economic dislocation, geopolitical instability, and copycat aggression by other states that takes us further down the road to a zero-sum, dog-eat-dog world. The U.S. government is reportedly discussing changing its nuclear strategy to increase the role of so-called tactical weapons in deterrence, while governments in Europe and East Asia are discussing increasing the role of nuclear deterrence.
This would be a mistake. There is an alternative to deterrence dogma that is being worked on by a group of other countries, supported by civil society, religious organizations and business. The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that came into force five years ago and already has 100 countries—a clear global majority—on board provides a verifiable and fair pathway to the elimination of nuclear weapons so that no country, including those that possess them now, can be threatened by them.
The TPNW has put humanitarian concerns at the center of the push for nuclear disarmament. Its members have also changed the terms of debate by calling out deterrence doctrine as a threat to the whole world.
Previously such concerns were not prominent in discussions on nuclear issues, with government ministers, diplomats, and the military preferring to speak in abstract language about deterrence, rather than address the reality that they are weapons designed to cause mass, indiscriminate, lingering harm to civilians.
In a world where great power rivalry and looking after number one is back with a vengeance, the TPNW shows that multilateral dialogue and diplomacy are still very much alive. The wise option for all countries is to jettison the illusion of deterrence and come together to prevent us from destroying ourselves.
Melissa Parke is executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. She formerly worked for the United Nations in Gaza, Kosovo, New York and Lebanon and served as Australia’s minister for international development.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.