George Perkovich
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Book Review: The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia
Since acquiring atomic weapons, India, Pakistan and North Korea have not engaged in major warfare. But nuclear deterrence alone does not buy peace — diplomacy must keep the balance.
Source: Nature

By the mid-1970s, China, Israel and India had nuclear explosives, and Pakistan and South Africa were preparing to join them. These nations treated nuclear weapons differently. They built relatively few, did not deploy them for immediate use and kept them largely out of political view. South Africa disarmed in the early 1990s, and North Korea became nuclear-armed. Of the nine countries that have nuclear weapons today, the United States and Russia are hardly typical.
Read the full article in Nature.
About the Author
Japan Chair for a World Without Nuclear Weapons, Senior Fellow
George Perkovich is the Japan Chair for a World Without Nuclear Weapons and a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program. He works primarily on nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, and disarmament issues, and is leading a study on nuclear signaling in the 21st century.
- How to Assess Nuclear ‘Threats’ in the Twenty-First CenturyPaper
- “A House of Dynamite” Shows Why No Leader Should Have a Nuclear TriggerCommentary
George Perkovich
Recent Work
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
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