Q.Nuclear weapons as deterrence or defence have limited usage against contemporary security threats to states. Explain the statement.

The statement highlights a fundamental shift in the nature of security threats. Nuclear weapons were designed for the Cold War era, where the primary danger was a large-scale, conventional invasion by another state. Their value lies in deterrence — the threat of massive retaliation prevents an adversary from launching a first strike. However, this logic fails against contemporary threats that are non-state, diffuse, and asymmetric.

Consider the main security challenges states face today:

• Terrorism and insurgency: Non-state actors do not have a territory or population centre to hold hostage. A nuclear threat is meaningless against a suicide bomber or a hidden cell.
• Cyber attacks: These can cripple infrastructure without a single soldier crossing a border. There is no physical target to retaliate against with nuclear force.
• Internal conflicts and civil wars: A nuclear weapon cannot be used to quell a rebellion within a state's own borders without destroying the state itself.
• Environmental and health crises: Pandemics, climate change, and resource scarcity threaten human security directly. A nuclear arsenal offers no defence against a virus or a drought. …

The statement you are examining touches on a profound shift in how we understand security in the twenty-first century. For decades, the logic of nuclear weapons was straightforward: if you have them, no one will attack you for fear of devastating retaliation. This is the doctrine of deterrence. It worked, in a terrifying way, during the Cold War. Two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, faced each other with thousands of nuclear warheads, and neither dared to strike first. The threat was massive, visible, and came from a single, identifiable enemy.

But the world has changed. The most pressing security threats today are not armies massing at borders or enemy cities waiting to be bombed. They are diffuse, shadowy, and operate below the threshold of nuclear response. Consider terrorism. A non-state group like Al-Qaeda or ISIS does not have a capital city, a standing army, or a national population to hold hostage. If a terrorist cell detonates a bomb in a major city, whose territory do you threaten with a nuclear strike? The group has no fixed address. The weapon is useless because there is no credible target for retaliation.

The same logic applies to cyberattacks. A hostile actor, possibly a state-sponsored group or a lone hacker, can cripple a nation's power grid, banking system, or communication networks without firing a single bullet. The attack is anonymous, deniable, and often routed through servers in multiple countries. How do you threaten nuclear retaliation against a keyboard? You cannot. The attacker is invisible, and the weapon is too blunt an instrument to use. …