We're Edging Closer To Nuclear War

Earlier this year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists wound the so-called Doomsday Clock forward to 2.5 minutes to midnight. Designed to show the relative risk of catastrophic nuclear war, the Doomsday Clock now stands at its most dire level since 1953.

But why is the risk so high?

Since the end of the Cold War, the risk of superpower confrontation has dropped, and indeed the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD) always made this a remote possibility to begin with, even during the height of the US-Soviet confrontation. As well, the number of operational nuclear weapons in the world was significantly reduced through a number of successful arms reduction treaties.

Yet now, a number of new states including Pakistan, India and North Korea have breached the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to become nuclear powers in their own right. While these countries are also unlikely to initiate an intentional nuclear strike, their small arsenals are in a constant state of high alert, thus an accidental launch is a much more likely possibility. As well, these are countries mired by internal instability. If they suffer from state failure, nuclear weapons could possibly be stolen by terrorist groups.

So can we calculate this probability?

Statistics and political analysis website FiveThirtyEight attempts to do just that. Looking at the possible ways nuclear weapons could be used, and using interviews with a wide range of experts, they show just how alarmingly real the possibility of a nuclear attack is. What's worse, they also determine that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was not wrong, and the risk of nuclear war is indeed increasing.