Latest Issue

December 2025

A new era of nuclear weapons is taking shape – with more state actors pursuing (and potentially testing) weapons, new technologies expanding the ways those weapons can be moved and used, and decreasing international capacities for controlling the associated risks. Conventional, technical solutions for nuclear deterrence and/or stability, alone, are insufficient to manage this dangerous moment. Broader perspectives, partnerships, and movements are needed to elicit new possibilities and solutions to prevent future nuclear war. Accordingly, this Peace Policy issue offers six essays considering ways that history, ethics, and peacebuilding approaches can help.

In this issue: David Cortright, historian and former leader of the “nuclear freeze” movement, highlights the critical roles citizen movements played in driving past nuclear arms control achievements. Robert Latiff, retired Air Force general, puts the current Golden Dome plan in the context of past missile defense initiatives and the challenge of maintaining a balance of power. Kelsey Davenport, distinguished Kroc Institute alum and member of the Kroc Institute advisory board now directing policy at the Arms Control Association, reflects on the broader approaches needed to prevent the emergence of even more nuclear armed states. Gerard Powers, coordinator of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, calls for re-engaging and updating ethical frameworks to constrain nuclear weapons. Maryann Cusimano Love, leading scholar of Catholic ‘Just Peace’ theory, offers principles to reverse the current nuclear arms escalation. Finally, I share my thoughts on how more conversation between the arms control and peacebuilding fields could yield innovative approaches.

These articles complement an important policy brief written by Peter Wallensteen and Armend Bekaj, published by the Keough School of Global Affairs last month, on the role of sanctions in preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons.

In a statement during his visit to Hiroshima, Japan, this summer, Notre Dame’s President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., urged universities to “help bring about the moral about-face that is necessary if the world is to have any hope of escaping the nuclear predicament.” We hope this issue contributes to that important call to action.

–Peter Quaranto
Visiting Professor of the Practice & Global Policy Fellow, Keough School of Global Affairs