Toward a More Proliferated World? The Geopolitical Forces that Will Shape the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
How worried does the United States need to be about nuclear proliferation over the next 10-20 years? Are the risks of nuclear proliferation increasing or decreasing? Are U.S. policy tools sufficient to manage future proliferation challenges? The United States has steadily built a framework of disincentives and barriers to prevent nuclear proliferation, but there are new reasons to question whether that framework is adequate. A series of geopolitical trends--from waning U.S. influence to strategic competition--stand to increase pressures on countries to seek nuclear weapons or related capabilities as a hedge, dilute the effectiveness of traditional U.S. nonproliferation and counterproliferation policy tools, and increasingly pit nonproliferation objectives against other strategic goals, forcing harder tradeoffs. The result will be a more complex and challenging nuclear landscape.
Eric Brewer is deputy director and senior fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Mr. Brewer has extensive experience working nuclear proliferation challenges in the U.S. government, including Iran and North Korea. Prior to joining CSIS, Mr. Brewer was a council on Foreign Relations International Affairs fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Mr. Brewer also served as the director for Counterproliferation at the National Security Council, where he was responsible for coordinating U.S. policy to prevent and reverse the spread of nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, and related technologies. While at the NSC, Mr. Brewer played a lead role in developing and executing elements of U.S. North Korea policy. From 2014 to 2017, Mr. Brewer served as deputy national intelligence officer for WMD and Proliferation at the National Intelligence Council. In that capacity, he led the Intelligence Community's analysis of foreign nuclear weapons capabilities and intentions, proliferation trends, and over-the-horizon proliferation threats.
