Dozens of feet below the fields of Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado, in an area dubbed the “nuclear sponge” by early defense intellectuals, the United States’ fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, wait for a launch order. Built in the early 1960s, the ICBMs are spaced at least three miles apart so that a single incoming weapon cannot be “absorbed” by more than one silo. Spread out across the missile fields, in cramped, subterranean control centers, Air Force personnel await an order to launch a nuclear attack. Across Russia and western China, similar silo fields expect orders of their own—though some of the Chinese silos are also waiting to be loaded with missiles. Submarines armed with nuclear missiles wander deep in the world’s oceans and bombers sit grounded on air bases across nine nuclear-armed countries and their allies, all in expectation of a launch order that could arrive at any moment.
They may not know it, but the fundamental condition of most civilians in comprehensively armed countries—those that possess nuclear weapons—is waiting. Any nuclear war scenario, or “deterrence failure,” in the chilly language of the defense intellectual, would involve hundreds of millions of deaths. (Of course, this is true of people everywhere, regardless of whether they live in a country with nukes; such an attack would mark the end of agriculture and perhaps plant life as we know it, thanks to profound changes to the global climate caused by ash produced by the detonations and the huge fires that would follow.) Tax dollars may flow smoothly to the bombs and drones that sustain wars around the world, but when your country has nuclear weapons—regardless if you believe they should exist—you are little more than a target. This is true even if your country, say, the United States, refuses to rule out the possibility of launching a nuclear strike first in a conflict. The primary benefit of such a policy is its purported ability to make the other guy think twice. But it’s virtually guaranteed that the country that goes first will also suffer massive casualties.
It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World
A U.S. citizen is linked to the launch process by a single, tenuous thread of democratic control—namely, the presidential election. Legally, only the president can initiate nuclear weapons use, despite sporadic efforts to require congressional approval. But the Electoral College is cold comfort when mutually assured destruction is on perpetual standby. In his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine, the late Daniel Ellsberg describes how “the basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago: Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian military targets including command and control, many in or near cities.” If the war plans Ellsberg refers to were carried out, there would be approximately three hundred million initial casualties. In 2022, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists placed the number of potential casualties two years out from an all-out nuclear war around 5.3 billion, or 65 percent of the global population, including deaths from radiation sickness and the destruction of the agricultural systems that sustain human life.
Even if you believe that the better instincts of world leaders will prevail, the possibility of stumbling into a civilization-ending situation is real. The United States keeps its ICBMs ready to launch at any moment. Once launched, these missiles cannot be recalled. In the six or so decades of their existence, the world has repeatedly come close to just this scenario. In some cases, inaccurate or misinterpreted data has almost resulted in an accidental second strike—as happened in 1979, when a training tape that used a large-scale nuclear attack scenario was mistaken by the United States as indicating an actual incoming Soviet attack; or in 1995, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin nearly ordered a nuclear attack on the United States in response to what later proved to be a scientific rocket launch by Norway. Other times a more diffuse incompetence has prevailed, as in 2014 when over half the Air Force personnel responsible for the ICBMs at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana were shown to have cheated on tests related to their duties. Dozens of near misses have reached the level of public knowledge; many more may have not.
Dozens of near misses have reached the level of public knowledge; many more may have not.
The ongoing existence of nuclear weapons is predicated on the promise of absolute security, or, in their absence, certain death. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, states with nuclear weapons have rarely felt the need to argue in favor of maintaining a stockpile. Top brass from the Department of Defense have occasionally trotted out histograms depicting wartime fatalities by percent of the population, showing a meaningful bump during World War II before dropping down below one percent after the invention of nuclear weapons. (Never mind that the world’s population has more than tripled since then, or that none of these numbers include a real reckoning with civilian casualties from the full span of military engagements that haven’t quite been called wars.) In this account, nuclear weapons do the bulk of the work in attaining total safety for those they protect; the rest is a matter for an expansive surveillance state and an unspecified number of ongoing military operations across the world.
A security founded on the existence of nuclear weapons rests on tacit acceptance of the prospect of everything and everyone you know being destroyed. Whole industries have sprouted up to keep tabs on the progress of apocalypse. In previous decades, information about nuclear weapons might reach the public if a government employee leaked it to the press, as was the case with Mordechai Vanunu, the former nuclear technician who spent nearly twenty years in prison after revealing details of the Israeli nuclear program to journalists. Or one nuclear-armed government might strategically reveal information about another’s arsenal in an effort to shift public opinion or justify policy, as with the U.S. Department of Defense’s periodic announcements about China’s recent expansion of its nuclear arsenal. (The United States has a stockpile of about 3,700 nuclear warheads, to China’s five hundred.)
Open-source intelligence, on the other hand, has over the past two decades taken advantage of increasingly sophisticated consumer tech and commercial satellite imagery to locate and gather precise information about nuclear weapons, unannounced military activity, and potential accidents. Nongovernmental organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute publish estimates of weapons numbers, military budgets, and arms transfers carefully gleaned from a wide range of sources. But holes in the veil of nuclear secrecy do not necessarily result in policy more amenable to the public good when only a tiny handful of world leaders possess effective veto power over life on earth as we know it.
How We Learned to Stop Worrying
In the meantime, we occupy a collapsed future, expending vast resources to maintain the means to create crises that we lack the capacity to survive. Our contemporary state of atomic gridlock was formalized in the late 1960s, with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty was meant to create a structure for managing the spread of nuclear technology—led by the countries who already had the bomb, who would, in theory, generously share the benefits of this technology with the rest of the world, as President Eisenhower proposed in his 1953 “Atoms For Peace” speech. It designates the five countries that had tested a nuclear weapon before 1967—the United States, the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, and China—as nuclear-weapons states. It is no accident these are also the five permanent members possessing veto power in the UN Security Council. Although most of the countries that possess nuclear weapons today were pursuing a nuclear program in some form before 1967, those who managed to conduct a test before that time were those who won World War II and who were responsible for the reordering of the world that occurred in its wake, with no externally imposed limits on developing their militaries. The treaty added another consequential layer of formal structure to the postwar world order. Its sixth article requires these states to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” This means that technically, by their own choice, in whatever way they see fit, with no specified timeline, each nuclear-weapons state is required to bring the nuclear age to a close.
The nearly two hundred signatories not designated as nuclear-weapons states, on the other hand, are required to submit to regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to make sure they’re not developing such arms. Since then, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel have developed nuclear weapons. While North Korea abrogated the treaty before completing development of its own arsenal, none of the latter three have signed the treaty. Rather than proof that international treaties are ineffective, these countries’ freedom to build up arms unmolested is testament to the power of the other institutions, arrangements, and precedents that lock in the power of the nuclear-weapons states as enforcers of a legal arrangement where they are in charge of not only who has nuclear weapons but whether they exist at all.
We occupy a collapsed future, expending vast resources to maintain the means to create crises that we lack the capacity to survive.
A relative constant on the part of the nuclear-weapons states until fairly recently has been a rhetorical commitment to pursuing disarmament. This was true even as the number of total nuclear weapons grew, primarily due to the Soviet Union’s expansion of its nuclear weapons program, peaking at about 64,500 in 1986. In 1979, as the Soviet arsenal was rapidly expanding, the Jimmy Carter administration concluded SALT II, a treaty limiting U.S. and Soviet arsenals. President Carter described it in a speech as “more than a single arms-control agreement; it’s part of a long, historical process of gradually reducing the danger of nuclear war—a process that we in this room must not undermine.” His argument was firmly based on convictions of American military power but a far cry from contemporary assumptions that diplomacy is pointless when tensions are high.
Because the United States and Russia hold about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons in their arsenals, prospects for disarmament have risen and fallen with relations between the two countries. Beginning in the late 1980s, U.S.-Soviet agreements like the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty saw a precipitous fall where nuclear weapons were concerned, and the 1990s ushered in a popular mood of relative complacency. Since Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (labeled Star Wars by critics), the United States has invested huge sums in missile defense, a profitable but spottily effective industry, to shoot incoming missiles out of the sky. Unsurprisingly, this has given way to a wave of technological innovations in pursuit of missiles that can evade detection. Under the George W. Bush administration, the United States left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, originally negotiated to slow the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, by 2009 Barack Obama felt confident enough to set out a path toward total disarmament in the foreseeable future in a speech in Prague. As Russia conducted a comprehensive update of its military, however, the relationship declined; by the end of the Trump administration, all but one of the treaties of the 1980s and 1990s that controlled nuclear arsenals had been abandoned.
It’s understandable that any hope for even fewer nukes is on hold, if not totally dashed. Similarly, any statement that places nuclear disarmament as the end goal of current policy is easy to dismiss as a halfhearted attempt to dress up a deeper commitment to the arms race. But the consequences of abandoning even a verbal commitment to disarm mean, at best, relying on the long-term stability of the status quo. The Trump administration softened the official language around this obligation: rather than pursuing disarmament, it created a policy of “creating the conditions”—which conditions in particular being unclear—under which disarmament could occur, even as it abandoned arms control treaties and invested in new nuclear weapons systems. The Biden administration restored disarmament as the ultimate goal, at least theoretically. The 2022 nuclear posture review, a document every presidential administration releases detailing its management of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, mentions that the five nuclear-weapons states have “reaffirmed their commitment to their disarmament-related obligations.” The review directly mentions disarmament as a U.S. goal in a condemnation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—developed over the 2010s by non-nuclear countries frustrated with the nuclear-weapons states’ unwillingness to denuclearize—in language that recalls the passivity of the Trumpian formation: “The United States does not share the underlying assumption of the TPNW that the elimination of nuclear weapons can be achieved irrespective of the prevailing international security environment.”
Red Button Mashing
Given the obvious inequalities baked into the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the creeping conviction that disarmament is a lost cause is completely understandable. Having nuclear weapons certainly seems a rough guarantor of justice in a stalemate. But let’s not lose track of the real stakes in contemplating annihilation. When the United States worries about proliferation, it worries about countries it sees as opposed to its interests: most of all, Iran. In July 2024, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that Iran needs only a week to complete its development of a nuclear weapon. The United States has committed to a vision of Middle Eastern politics perpetually opposed to Iran’s, and a substantial minority of the U.S. political class has been pushing for war with the country for decades. Trump national security adviser John Bolton got his start in government during the Reagan administration; an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War, he opined in a 2002 speech to the Heritage Foundation that Bush’s “Axis of Evil” formulation went too easy on America’s enemies. Bolton placed Iran on equal footing with Iraq as far as threats to the United States go. Since then, he’s argued openly for American-led regime change in Iran and just recently urged Israel to strike its nuclear facilities.
Others close to the gooey center of the foreign policy blob may not be calling for military action with such shameless enthusiasm, but the United States’ unwavering support for Israel throughout its ongoing attacks on Gaza has exacerbated the situation as groups that receive support from Iran like Hezbollah and the Houthis become more involved. Since October 7, Israel and Iran have attacked each other directly and, as long as the war continues, it is increasingly likely that Iran will go nuclear (though some see hope in the newly elected President Masoud Pezeshkian’s interest in pursuing a new deal).
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has been pushing for a nuclear-sharing agreement as well as a security guarantee from the United States as part of a Saudi-Israel “normalization” deal that has been in the works for over a year. China has assisted in reopening relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran and helped explore Saudi uranium reserves, perhaps creating the sense in Washington—where keeping score with China has been at the center of the Biden administration’s foreign policy—that the United States might have something to gain from formally agreeing to come to the defense of a country that realistically will probably never return the favor. Saudi proposals would have the United States provide a uranium-enrichment facility, ostensibly to produce low-enriched fuel for nuclear power plants, but capable of producing weapons-grade uranium. Yet Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has stated with breezy confidence on at least two occasions that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia would do the same. There seems to be no expectation on Saudi Arabia’s part that they would face any serious obstacles or sanctions. What a Middle East with not one but three nuclear-weapons states would look like is something we will be left to contend with only if and when it occurs.
But what about neutral or cooperative countries? The United States’ security relationship with most of Europe, as well as Japan and South Korea, is defined by its commitment to providing “extended deterrence,” whereby a nuclear-weapons country commits to defend a non-nuclear country with its own weapons of mass destruction. This is supposed to remove the incentive for these countries to develop their own nukes or seek a similar relationship with a rival nuclear-weapons state, securing the global position the United States wants for itself in the bargain.
But the cracks in our foreign policy are showing: French President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly suggested that Europe develop a nuclear deterrence policy independent from the United States, at least partially based on France’s three hundred or so nuclear weapons. South Korea, which currently relies on the United States for protection from the north, is also considering the nuclear option in light of their robust nuclear power program; in fact, they are a successful exporter of nuclear power technology, with deals to construct nuclear power plants in Egypt, Czechia, and possibly the United Kingdom. In January of last year, President Yoon Suk Yeol told the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs that, should the threats of North Korea worsen, South Korea would “introduce tactical nuclear weapons or build them” itself. South Korean officials later walked back Yoon’s comments, but the United States has since increased its military presence in the country and, together with Japan, concluded a new security deal aimed at fending off China and North Korea.
Rather than affirming the fundamental danger of nuclear weapons, the United States is increasingly content to be the one doling out privileges, hoping to solidify its global supremacy for just a little bit longer. But each new nuclear-weapons state introduces an unprecedented set of dangers. U.S. political leaders are prone to say, as they have in the face of skepticism over our role in the war in Ukraine, that the United States should not dictate the policy of other countries: it can only go where it’s asked and hope for the best. But this assumes that the very real risk of accidentally triggering nuclear weapons can be managed forever. More vexing, it forecloses the possibility of leading by example and moving away from a reality where nuclear weapons are the ultimate guarantor of security.
The silver lining in the mushroom cloud is that we still have time. Any belief in an inevitable, violent end to civilization structures our future into a pre-apocalypse devoted to preparation. The soothsayers among us are burdened with the admission of helplessness before what is to come; religious visions of the end times are convenient cultural receptacles for managing a power beyond our ability to control. But there’s nothing divine about nuclear weapons. They were built by humans, and humans can take them apart. To regard them with mystic resignation is to commit a mortal error, especially when the future itself is at stake.