Nuclear-war risks rise again, stoked by global conflicts
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Cold War’s end promised relief from nuclear nightmares. Long-adversarial governments agreed to eliminate warheads and collaborated to stop the spread of atomic weapons.
That promise is now slipping away. Russian President Vladimir Putin last month touted new rules on using nuclear arms, offering Moscow’s latest signal of readiness to use atomic weapons in its defense. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is expanding.
Iran is close to developing usable nuclear weapons, prompting fears of a Middle East arms race. One of the two critical U.S.-Russian nuclear-arms-control treaties has collapsed. The other, which caps how many nuclear weapons Russia and the U.S.
deploy, expires in early 2026. A pledge made by declared atomic powers during the Cold War to strive for disarmament looks less realistic than ever. Roughly 60 years ago, President John F.
Kennedy warned that by 1975 the world could have 15 to 20 nuclear powers. His fears were inflated: there are only nine today. Still, the global nonproliferation system is in greater peril than at any time since the Cold War, says United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, Director-General Rafael Grossi.
The threat of a nuclear confrontation, which a decade ago seemed fanciful, is no longer unimaginable. “The shared consensus among great powers on the importance of nonproliferation—which was critical to building and sustaining the nonproliferation regime since the 1960s—has eroded," said Eric Brewer, a former director for counterproliferation at the National Security Council, now at the Nuclear Threat Initiative think tank. “I think at a minimum we’re going to end up in a world with more countries that are capable of building nuclear
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