When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the United States and Russia began the process of slowly dismantling their nuclear arsenals. Under the 2010 deal, New Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START), they are each limited to 1,550 deployed strategic weapons on land, at sea, and in the air. Russia's arsenal is missile-heavy, while the U.S. has a more balanced strategic arsenal.
That agreement expires in February 2026, with little prospect that it will be renewed or respected. That means that both the U.S. and Russia will be free to build as many nukes as they can manage. They can be as exotic as can be imagined; nuclear missiles that can stay aloft for weeks, "glide bombs" designed to evade radar, and the ubiquitous "suitcase bomb" that could blow up several blocks while irradiating an entire city.
Unlike policymakers of the past during the nuclear standoffs of the 1960s-1990s, today's leaders must face a vastly different atomic world.
The Federation of American Scientists, an organization created by scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, has been tracking the worrisome trends and believes the prospect of nuclear war has never been greater.
Nine nations now have nuclear weapons: Russia, the United States, Britain, China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Together, they possess more than 12,200 nuclear warheads, located at approximately 120 sites in 14 countries. More than 9,500 are militarily active or deployed, ready for use. Roughly 2,100 of those are on high alert and can be launched in minutes and reach any point on the planet in less than half an hour.
The Federation and other nuclear experts refer to the nine-nation nuclear club as a "three-body problem." This is a phenomenon in physics that states the "gravitational interaction between three objects is exponentially more difficult to predict than between two," according to the Post. The problem is that even if the U.S. and Russia agree to reduce their nuclear stockpiles, nations such as China, India, and Pakistan will continue to build out, complicating the equation.
China is the key. They are building nuclear weapons as fast as their labs and industrial base can turn them out. The fear is that the more China builds, the more tempting it will be for both the U.S. and Russia to expand their own arsenals, putting us right back in the middle of the 1960s.
This time, the drive for nukes will encompass many more countries. If, as expected, Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia won't be far behind. Also, with America retreating in the world, many nations, such as Japan, Germany, and Brazil, which may have previously considered themselves under America's nuclear umbrella, would consider building their own nuclear shield.
Another aspect of the problem is that modern nukes are terrifically more destructive than nukes from 40 years ago.
The total power of the warheads in the nine nuclear-armed states is an inconceivable destructive force: equivalent to more than 4.8 trillion pounds of TNT — or more than 145,000 Hiroshima bombs. A single U.S. strategic submarine can carry enough warheads to destroy any country, and detonation of a few hundred weapons could propel enough dust and soot into the air to block sunshine, cool the atmosphere and halt crops from growing — “nuclear winter.” Such a sequence of events would lead to worldwide famine.
In her 2024 bestseller, “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” Annie Jacobsen draws on scientific research to describe a postapocalyptic world in which cities and forests burn, temperatures plunge, lakes and rivers freeze, crops and farm animals die, toxic chemicals poison the air, people succumb to radiation poisoning or disease. “Only time will tell if we humans will survive,” she writes.
The recent spat between India and Pakistan resulted in both sides threatening to use nukes. Russian President Vladimir Putin has almost casually threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. This is light years beyond what the U.S. and Russia did during the Cold War. Even mentioning atomic war by a high-ranking government official in either country was enough to cause a shudder in the stock market.
Today, talk of nuclear war appears to be routine, making the "unthinkable" thinkable.
Perhaps the gravest risk is the chance of accidental war. Once again, the three-body problem presents itself.
Each of the nine countries’ leaders and the systems they use to control nuclear weapons will have to get every decision right every time. Deterrence theory relies on the assumption that decision-makers are rational actors. In recent years, we’ve seen leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un increasingly willing to use the manipulation of nuclear risk as a tool of coercion — an unsettling departure from the past.
Arms control agreements are next to useless. Unless all nine (or more) nuclear powers agree to limit or destroy their stockpiles, somebody, somewhere, somehow is going to light the fuse.
It's going to happen sooner rather than later.
