Press Release
Release of ASPI Strategy Report
A delicate issue: Asia’s nuclear future
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) today released a new report which explores the issue of
nuclear weapons in Asia.
This Strategy, titled ‘A delicate issue: Asia’s nuclear future’, says the world stands on the cusp of a new
era in nuclear relations—one in which Asia is likely to become the dominant influence on global nuclear
arrangements. The old, bilateral nuclear symmetry of the Cold War is giving way to new multiplayer,
asymmetric nuclear relationships.
And it is doing so at a time when power balances are shifting across Asia, when pressures for proliferation
are returning to the regional agenda, and when non-state actors are an increasingly worrying part of the
Asian nuclear equation.
Report author Rod Lyon judges that, ‘we are headed into a nuclear order of which we have little
previous experience.’
The paper argues that Australia’s own policy options will be profoundly shaped by how Asia’s nuclear
future unfolds. We can assist with redesigning nuclear order in a cooperative Asia, including by drawing
regional countries into a discussion about how stable deterrent relationships can be built across deep
power asymmetries. But a darker, more competitive Asian nuclear future—a future characterised by
proliferation, growing credibility problems for US extended nuclear deterrence arrangements, or the return
of a revisionist great power—would confront Australian policymakers with difficult choices, of hedging
rather than ordering.
‘Nuclear latency’—the set of nuclear-related skills, materials and possible weapons systems—will grow in
both Asian futures, Dr Lyon said. But it would obviously be more worrying in the darker future: there ‘the
gaps between mere latency, actual nuclear hedging, and covert proliferation might well become less
distinct.’
The report concludes that Australian strategic policy should retain the flexibility to accommodate a range
of possible Asian nuclear futures, striking a balance between its ordering and hedging strategies during a
possible turbulent era in regional security.
Rod Lyon is Program Director for the Strategy and International Program.
(ENDS)
14 December 2009
For further information please contact the author on 0400 710 784.
For copies of the report contact ASPI on (02) 6270 5100 or download from the website,
NEWS 
