I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
Now we have to focus on two great powers.
All the while, you've got a North Korea that is threatening South Korea and U.S.
allies, and you've got India-Pakistan, and you've got Israel-Iran,
and you've got all these other threats still lurking that we had to deal with.
But now the return of great power and nuclear competition,
I think, is the biggest shift from the 2009-2010 years.
If we get this moment wrong,
you're going to see a lot more countries possessing nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons programs in the coming five and 10 years than the decade preceding it.
It wasn't long ago that both heads of state and prominent policymakers could speak seriously about a world without nuclear weapons.
But in the course of just a few years, nuclear concerns have come back in force.
Arms control has broken down almost entirely.
China has started a massive expansion of its arsenal.
putting basic assumptions about deterrence and doubt,
Vladimir Putin has threatened nuclear use in Ukraine,
threats that were taken very seriously by American officials,
and proliferation risks have grown with regard to both to American adversaries like Iran and to American allies in Europe and Asia,
who may no longer trust security commitments from the United States.
Vipin Nureng and Pernay Vadi until recently oversaw nuclear policy in the Pentagon and on the National Security Council.
In a new essay for Foreign Affairs, They call the situation nothing short of a Category 5 hurricane.