Ankit Panda has written the most comprehensive and accessible overview of the “new nuclear age” and the dangers it poses for international security. The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon contends that novel technological developments, long-standing and emerging political disputes between the nuclear-armed states, and the demise of arms control and other tools to control nuclear dangers are all combining to render the emerging nuclear landscape more fraught, unpredictable, and liable to escalation. Panda offers readers an expert (if, as the book’s subtitle suggests, troubling) tour of this landscape. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand the most worrisome parts and most apocalyptic possibilities of the current and future international environment.

Panda is not the first analyst to identify the emergence of a new nuclear era or age. It is now widely accepted in academic and policy communities that today’s nuclear risks are higher than those of the first and second nuclear ages, roughly characterized by the bipolar superpower competition and mutual assured destruction of the Cold War and then the period after the Cold War through the mid-2010s, respectively. Indeed, there is also a fair amount of agreement among scholars and analysts about the various factors that make the new nuclear era dangerous: a multipolar distribution of power; a range of new technologies; worsening political relations among nuclear-armed states; and so on. Panda’s contribution, then, is less in making entirely original claims about the new nuclear landscape than in comprehensively mapping its topography. The book is clearly written, rendering often complex technical and political issues accessible to a broad range of readers and getting to the heart of the thorny political questions and moral dilemmas nuclear weapons raise. And while Panda’s book ranges broadly, it does not sacrifice nuance or resort to simplistic generalizations. For example, the discussion of technology in chapter 3 avoids the common tendency to discuss technological developments in overly general terms or to lump distinct technologies together. Instead, Panda shows the distinctive escalation dynamics that different technologies may set in motion while also being careful to acknowledge the significant uncertainty we have about how these technologies and their political effects may develop over time and interact with states’ nuclear capabilities.

The New Nuclear Age is excellent and should be widely read. In the spirit of (modest) provocation, I raise two potential questions about the book’s broader implications for how we should think about the new nuclear age.

First, it remains somewhat unclear just how “new” the new nuclear age really is. In other words, does the new nuclear age really mark a discontinuity from prior nuclear ages? Indeed, Panda’s own analysis prompts this question as it ably documents the deep and historical roots of many features of the emerging nuclear era. To take one example, Panda outlines the potentially destabilizing effects of new U.S. offensive cyber capabilities against North Korea: essentially suggesting that North Korea may fear that the United States could use cyber operations to prevent it from using its nuclear weapons and thus that North Korea might believe its nuclear weapons cannot effectively deter U.S. military action against the country (pp. 90–96). But as Panda shows elsewhere, U.S. efforts to threaten adversary nuclear weapons (through so-called “counterforce capabilities”) have a long history going back to the heart of the first nuclear age (pp. 56–63). As a result, today’s offensive cyber capabilities can reasonably be understood, using Panda’s own words, as “old wine in a new bottle—and that old wine is counterforce” (p. 94). Such an interpretation problematizes our understanding of the first nuclear era, showing it was perhaps less stable and more dangerous than previously thought. This, in turn, renders the new nuclear age less different from its predecessors: Today’s nuclear age may in fact be governed by the same competitive and hazardous dynamics of the Cold War. In other words, a reasonable conclusion from Panda’s book might be less that we are in a fundamentally new nuclear age but instead in the latest episode of a single long-running and ultimately deeply dangerous nuclear age now over eighty years old.

Second, Panda’s book aims for an audience beyond political scientists and so avoids getting bogged down in theoretical debates of primary interest to academics (though Panda is clearly familiar and comfortable with those debates). This is not a problem for the book, though it raises some interesting questions. For example, Panda’s policy recommendations seem to align (broadly speaking) with the so-called “theory of the nuclear revolution,” a collection of ideas proposed by prominent international relations scholars including Robert Jervis, Charles Glaser, and Kenneth Waltz. Such arguments emphasize the politically stabilizing properties of nuclear weapons when conditions of mutually assured destruction exist and when states accept their own vulnerability to their adversaries’ nuclear weapons. Nuclear-armed states, according to this line of argument, should (and will) avoid challenging each other’s core interests, invest in nuclear capabilities emphasizing retaliation rather than nuclear first use or counterforce, and fear the escalation that nuclear brinkmanship can trigger.

Panda’s policy recommendations and analysis often echo these lines of argument. For example, among other things, he suggests that the nuclear-armed states should exhibit restraint in targeting or developing capabilities that may threaten their adversaries’ nuclear forces (pp. 203–305) both in general terms but also with respect to specific emerging technologies such as offensive cyber capabilities (p. 94–95); should “scope [their] interests appropriately” in their dealings with other countries to reduce nuclear risks (p. 150); and should abandon the goal of denuclearizing North Korea and accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state capable of harming the United States (p. 172). Indeed, Panda’s “most fundamental prescription is to fear the bomb” (p. 222, emphasis in original). All of these recommendations are persuasively made and have merit, but they stand in tension with Panda’s analysis of the current and past nuclear eras, which portrays a world (both past and present) in which states are competing aggressively for nuclear advantages, see nuclear weapons and the leveraging of nuclear risks as a way to achieve both revisionist and status quo political goals they consider crucial, and are eager to threaten each other’s nuclear forces. In other words, Panda’s analysis of the nuclear landscape seems to portray precisely the sort of world in which states will, ultimately, not find his recommendations attractive.

These questions neither detract from the quality of Panda’s book nor temper its success in analyzing the sources of danger in today’s nuclear world. But they do highlight the deep tensions and fundamental difficulties we continue to have in understanding, let alone solving, the political dynamics unleashed by the most destructive weapons humans have ever created.