In our latest episode, we explore how nuclear fail-safe reviews can reduce the risk of accidental, mistaken, or unauthorised nuclear use. Experts discuss national approaches to fail-safe, the tensions between secrecy and transparency, and the role of nuclear-armed and non-nuclear-weapon states in advancing nuclear risk reduction. Hosted by the ELN’s Deputy Executive Director, Bekki Field.
Nuclear weapons aren’t going anywhere, and the way we manage them can and must keep evolving. Today’s security environment is more complex than during the Cold War: more nuclear-armed states, faster decision-making technologies, and fewer treaties providing guardrails. The good news? Proven tools exist to reduce risk, from fail-safe mechanisms to dialogue between adversaries, and they don’t all require perfect trust or total agreement. This animation explains both the challenges and the credible paths forward.
Former and serving senior officials, military leaders, and experts from across the Euro-Atlantic region call for strengthened fail-safe measures to prevent accidental nuclear use.
In times of eroding arms control measures, nuclear-weapons states should consider enhancing transparency around their nuclear safety, security and reliability mechanisms (‘fail-safe’) to strengthen the risk reduction agenda. This policy brief, by ELN Senior Policy Fellow Julia Berghofer, shows how France and the UK can advance fail-safe individually and bilaterally, as well as in the P3 and P5 contexts. Non-nuclear-weapon states parties to the NPT and members of NATO could also support this.
Fail-safe reviews aim to strengthen safeguards to prevent the unauthorised, inadvertent, or mistaken use of a nuclear weapon. In collaboration with NTI, EASLG, and APLN, the ELN has been working to highlight the benefits of independent, internal “fail-safe” reviews in nuclear-armed states. These summaries are from ELN and APLN nuclear fail-safe workshops with non-governmental partners in China, India, Pakistan, France, and the UK.
Former and serving senior officials, military leaders, and experts from across the Euro-Atlantic region call on all nuclear arms states to reduce the risk of nuclear blunder, and to cooperate to eliminate nuclear risks and threats.