It’s Time for the East Asia Summit to Tackle Nuclear Proliferation

As more countries consider acquiring nuclear weapons, the EAS should take the lead in addressing the growing challenges of proliferation. 

Officials attend the East Asia Summit Preparatory Senior Officials’ Meeting in Port Dickson, Malaysia, Sep. 10, 2025.

In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy warned that in the 1970s the world might have up to 25 nuclear weapon states. He was making the case for an international agreement to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. That agreement, the NPT, proved to be perhaps the most significant arms control agreement ever negotiated.

Today we stand at a similar juncture. Left unattended the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation is significant and growing; nowhere more so than in the Indo-Pacific.

The NPT succeeded because it convinced countries contemplating acquiring nuclear weapons that proliferation was ultimately destabilizing. It rested on a series of incentives such as access to nuclear power for peaceful purposes; an international safeguards regime, which engendered confidence that nuclear material was not diverted from peaceful to military purposes; and the pledge that ultimately the five nuclear weapon states recognized by the treaty would engage in comprehensive disarmament. Not every element of this compact was delivered but enough was to convince most countries not to consider crossing the nuclear threshold.

Those assumptions are now being revisited. Countries such as South Korea and Poland talk openly about acquiring nuclear weapons. Others are revisiting whether it is an option they should keep open. Even in Australia, a leading advocate for non-proliferation, some 39 percent of Australians support acquiring nuclear weapons, according to the latest Lowy Institute poll. The dominoes are upright for now, but if one falls others will surely follow.

At the heart of the proliferation challenge are shifting perceptions of how to buttress security in a world facing a bonfire of certainties.

What we are seeing in the Indo-Pacific is a double hedging strategy. Regional states want to hedge against China’s hegemonic ambitions. But they also want to hedge against U.S. unreliability, which has been President Donald Trump’s legacy to Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

This has significant implications for extended nuclear deterrence, one of the supporting pillars of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. If the United States is perceived as an unreliable partner, how credible is extended nuclear deterrence? Can we really believe, for example, the U.S. would sacrifice San Francisco to save Sydney? 

The end of the post-war international order is leading more countries to invest in deterrent capabilities and to pursue a larger measure of strategic autonomy. These are seen as buffers against strategic instability and an overreliance on the U.S. cavalry coming to the assistance of its allies and partners.

For some the logic of both deterrence and strategic autonomy ends with nuclear weapons, increasingly seen as both the ultimate deterrent and the ultimate protector of autonomy. Nuclear arms are the reason, some argue, why North Korea (which withdrew from the NPT) has not been attacked while NPT member Iran has; why Ukraine would have been better off if it had retained Soviet era nuclear weapons.

These assumptions may be questionable, even simplistic, but they are gaining more traction. They cannot be ignored.

If we want to prevent the superficially appealing from becoming compelling, we........

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