Are we entering a new age of nuclear proliferation?

Not only are major nuclear-weapon states failing to pursue arms control and disarmament; they are openly doubling down on "modernising" and expanding their arsenals to match their increasingly bellicose rhetoric

Russian president Vladimir Putin, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, and Chinese president Xi Jinping talk ahead of the Shanghai Co-operation summit in Tianjin, China, last September.

No longer is the threat posed by nuclear weapons even tenuously contained by mutually agreed rules and accepted norms. Instead, it is returning with a vengeance, pushing us all to the edge of the abyss.

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, nuclear arsenals are growing, and the weapons themselves are becoming more lethal, more diverse, and more vulnerable. Nuclear rhetoric is becoming ever more threatening, and nuclear-armed states more brazenly confrontational.