Principal speaker
Dr Rod Lyon
Nuclear weapons in Asia: their strategic and political significance
Nuclear weapons have typically played a secondary role in Asian strategic balances. Even during the Cold War, the nuclear contest between the two global superpowers had only a light footprint in Asia. Proliferation has seen China, India, Pakistan and North Korea build their own nuclear weapons. But China has refused to play in a numbers contest with the US and Russia. The South Asia contest has been tense but stable. And North Korea has sought nuclear weapons primarily for regime protection and blackmail. No US ally has broken from its extended nuclear assurance arrangement with Washington to pursue its own arsenal. Can that benign state of affairs survive the pressures now being exerted by a transformational Asian security environment? Or do trends already underway imply a larger role for nuclear weapons in Asian strategic balances, one that might fracture the Asian nuclear order, or take it in a more competitive direction?
Dr Rod Lyon is currently a fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. His research interests include international security, nuclear strategy and Australian strategic policy. He has previously worked in both academic and intelligence assessment positions. And he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2004, researching the relative weighting of alliances and coalitions in US strategic thinking post-9/11.
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RSVP on or before Monday 31 August 2015 , by email b.hammond@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 54705