From the editor

Abstract

In this issue’s opening article, Oliver Meier and Maren Vieluf focus on a category of politicians that they label “nationalist populists,” some of whom have come to lead nucleararmed states. Meier and Vieluf argue that such leaders “undermine the nuclear order and increase nuclear dangers in novel, significant, and persistent ways” through their words and actions. Because their thesis has significant implications for scholarship and policy, we asked four other experts—Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, Michael Cohen, Jacques E. C. Hymans, and Nina Tannenwald—to comment on the article. In his response, Hymans describes the article as “agenda-setting.” We think that’s a well-chosen term for an essay that launches a discussion of an important topic, rather than offering the final and definitive word on it. We look forward to seeing how that discussion transpires. Meier and Vieluf wrote before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but their ideas take on added meaning in the wake of that event. That is equally true of other articles in this issue —for example, the piece in which Hanna Notte, Sarah Bidgood, Nikolai Sokov, Michael Duitsman, and William Potter track and analyze innovations in Russia’s strategic arsenal. Mining Russian-language sources, declassified intelligence documents, and satellite imagery, they identify the principal drivers of Russian military innovation by focusing on five novel nuclear, conventional, or dual-capable delivery systems. In their second jointly authored article to appear in this journal, Stefano Costanzi and Gregory D. Koblentz discuss flaws in current control lists for chemical-weapons agents and their precursors. These gaps were highlighted by Russia’s use of Novichok, or “A-series,” nerve agents in the poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 and Alexei Navalny in 2020. Costanzi and Koblentz propose a “family-based” approach that involves adding not just a single overlooked nerve agent and its precursors to control lists, but instead identifying groups or “families” of deadly chemicals, encompassing agents that may remain secret or that might be created in the future. David D. Palkki and Lawrence Rubin re-examine Saddam Hussein’s role in the use of chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. They consider whether Saddam directly ordered the attack, closely analyzing records such as transcripts of US interrogations of former senior Iraqi officials after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Palkki and Rubin do not find unambiguous evidence of an explicit order from Saddam to carry out the attack, but they conclude that he had created a “command environment” that promoted such actions. Similar questions may arise in the context of war crimes allegedly perpetrated by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—or, for that matter, those of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Returning to the nuclear realm, Thomas E. Doyle II addresses a question that may seem less theoretical than it used to: if a country used nuclear weapons in war, breaking the “nuclear taboo” that has remained in place since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, how might the rest of the world restore nuclear restraint and preserve the taboo? The prescriptions that arise from an ethicist’s perspective may be at odds with the traditional views of military strategists.