Should the World Eliminate Nuclear Weapons?

• There have been at least 13 documented near-misses since 1945 — incidents where a misread radar, a communication failure, or a single officer's judgment was the only barrier between a false alarm and nuclear war. The 1983 Petrov incident, the 1995 Norwegian rocket launch, and the 1983 Able Archer exercise each nearly triggered exchanges. Probability compounds over time: if each decade has a 1-in-50 chance of accidental launch, the century-level risk is substantial.
• The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by 68 countries in 2021, reflects a growing international consensus that deterrence is a temporary holding pattern, not a permanent solution. The International Court of Justice ruled in 1996 that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally incompatible with international humanitarian law. The moral case for elimination has clear legal precedent.
• Global nuclear disarmament would free roughly $100 billion per year currently spent on maintaining, modernizing, and securing nuclear arsenals. The US alone plans to spend $1.7 trillion on nuclear modernization through 2046. That capital could fund climate adaptation, pandemic preparedness, and poverty reduction — goods that reduce the root causes of conflict without the civilizational risk.

Debater: To be announced

• The period since 1945 — the so-called 'Long Peace' — is the longest stretch without direct conflict between major powers in the history of the modern state system. Scholars from John Gaddis to Kenneth Waltz attribute this directly to nuclear deterrence: no great power dares fight another because the risk of escalation is existential. Eliminating that constraint makes conventional wars between nuclear-capable states possible again.
• Verification is an unsolved problem. Highly enriched uranium can be concealed in quantities too small to detect with current inspection regimes. A country that secretly retains even a handful of weapons after "disarming" gains a decisive advantage. The incentive to cheat is so strong that no inspection regime has ever successfully monitored a disarmament agreement among adversaries who don't trust each other.
• Geopolitical tensions that currently require nuclear arsenals to deter — US-Russia, India-Pakistan, Israel and its neighbors — would not disappear with the weapons. Countries facing existential threats from adversaries would quickly rebuild. Disarmament agreements signed without resolving underlying political conflicts are historically fragile; every major arms control treaty of the Cold War era eventually collapsed.

Debater: To be announced