There are now more actors with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Did you know that India has built two ssbns? (nuclear subs armed with balistic nuclear tipped missiles). North Korea has h bombs and ibcms, Pakistan has a bunch of fission bombs.

Worse who would disagree with the premise that the governance of nuclear armed states has deteriorated? China has a president for life, Russia wishes its president for life would live forever - because God alone knows what will crawl out and take over when putin goes (and if you think the Russians should be worried, the Germans should be hysterical about this but aren't which scares me much) and trump and brexit are bad signs too.

Also people seem to low ball the effect of a nuclear conflict or the media on a regular basis. Make no mistake, we are half an hour from 300m deaths. And that will be just the down payment.

edited - I meant to type fission but typed fussion.

I haven't thought much about this, to be honest, but I want to argue the opposite.

When considering the risks of nuclear war, there are (I would say) three principle risks:

1. An intentional first strike by an actor who is non-rational. (E.g., a believer in an apocalyptic ideology who does not respond to traditional deterrence.)

2. An intentional first strike by an actor who believes they can reduce or eliminate their target's second-strike capability (or for whom a nuclear first strike is otherwise a rational response).

3. An accidental launch due to C&C failures. (E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...)

I think one can easily argue that two of the three are more likely since the end of the Cold War!

Risk #1 is rather obvious: the rise of international terrorism combined with an increase in the number of (domestically) weak state actors who have nuclear capabilities--post-Soviet Russia, Pakistan--makes the risk of nuclear attack (via stolen weapons) by non-state actors credible.

Risk #2 is the one people normally think of, and, on a large scale--between traditional nuclear powers--it is probably lower than during the Cold War. I would consider two points here, however: first, this might never have been the principle risk during the Cold War (insofar as, with rational actors and full information, deterrence is effective), and second, there are multiple regional powers (again, the usual suspects: North Korea, Pakistan and India) for whom a first strike might be somewhat more tempting.

Risk #3 is also arguably worse. While the total size of deployed unclear arsenals has declined, the number of nuclear states has increased, increasing the odds on a C&C failure for any given nuclear state.

Interestingly, the significant point among all three observations boils down to "nuclear arms proliferation", which, well, duh--that increases the opportunity for mistaken or miscalculated use of nuclear weapons.

More interestingly, the US considering a withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty goes to another point: information access. As I noted above, deterrence seems to work with rational actors who have perfect information--by reducing access to information, we increase risks.

I think it is important to differentiate between atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs which are orders of magnitude more powerful. My understanding is that most of the proliferation has been in atomic rather than hydrogen bombs.

I think that a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon would be less likely to trigger a world ending counter attack since there is no state to target.

Therefore, I think it's possible that while the chances of a nuclear attack have gone up, the chances of nuclear Armageddon have gone down.

However, I am definitely not an expert so I may be mistaken.

> My understanding is that most of the proliferation has been in atomic rather than hydrogen bombs.

I think it's actually the opposite. The US stockpile consists of mostly (entirely?) thermonuclear weapons. They're smaller for a given yield, and are therefore much easier to deliver. Most of them are also variable-yield, so you can still use a hydrogen bomb to make a smaller boom if that fits your strategic goals.

Edit: it looks like this is the case for the other superpowers as well. The only nuclear state for which this may not be the case is Pakistan, although it's possible that they have a boosted weapon of some sort.

I think there may still be merit to the op’s case that we should distinguish between the risk of a nuclear attack and the risk of a nuclear exchange (or, “nuclear Armageddon”).

Some of the scenarios I outlined—rogue non-state actors, regional wars—may lead to isolated nuclear attacks but not full exchanges. I’m not sure if the hydrogen bomb distinction is relevant here.

(Yes, afaik what you say is true, but I think this is sort of a red herring.)

North Korea tested a h bomb. You can be sure India has h bombs too, the common wisdom is that Pakistan doesn't. Yet. If Iran gets nukes expect Pakistan to upgrade at pace.

Pretty sure we’re actively engaged in a Cold War now. But it is a war of information and finance.

The sooner we realize and accept this, the sooner we can find a way out of it.

Who are the sides of this conflict?

I think there are two (but kind of four) sides: US/EU vs. Russia/China. The EU is following the US because of its culture that it can relate to more. But it neither trust or likes the US; nor is happy with the US enemy being on its own border. China is following Russia because they have a better military. Russia probably doesn't trust China; not a single bit. But their economy is garbage and they'll need financial help to build more war toys.

The rest of the world is fragmented and not quite unified. I see the rest of the countries as trying to manage their internal problems while staying off the radar as much as practically possible; and they'll bow down to the leader whoever it is right now. (See FATCA and the current Chinese expansion in Africa).

We have been very close to the edge over the past few decades (see the Petrov story circa 1983) but there was one mitigating feature: at least nuclear launch control was held by a relatively small number of mostly politically stable actors. This situation didn’t exist by accident: it was maintained deliberately by the world’s various powers, typically at great cost. The rise of NK as a nuclear power isn’t a global threat all by itself, but it represents the unraveling of seventy-odd year’s of that status quo. If NK gets and keeps its nukes while participating in the global community, why not Iran? And if Iran succeeds, why not the next dozen countries, all of whom see some offensive or defensive value in holding them. For example: Japan and South Korea if either one determines we aren’t going to protect them from NK. And once nuclear capability spreads to dozens of countries, all entangled in various alliances and with varying degrees of stability, the probability of a launch followed by a chain reaction get much higher.

ps: Ukraine gave away their nukes for a promise of security with the budapest memorandum ca 1995. I suspect this has a high effect on any future promises by the nuclear backed countries.

The Budapest Memorandum has nothing to do with the EU.

It was signed by Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, the USA, and the UK. And signed in a country that only joined the EU a decade later.

In 2013 (and before) the EU managed to convince the Ukraine that if it signed an association agreement it would be supported both economically and politically and no nasty Russians would do anything nasty.

As soon as the reality of what the EU was willing to put on the table was crystallised in black and white it became obvious that there was no way on earth that this would fly. This precipitated the unwinding of the Ukrainian polity and the unholy mess that they have to deal with now. The EU has been singularly absent from attempting to resolve or manage this situation because they have no way to deal with the Russians, and the Russians know it.

The Budapest Memorandum does, in fact, have a lot to do with the EU because it has a border with The Ukraine.

At some point in the near future it is going to become really, really, really obvious that the EU in general and Germany in particular is underspending on defence by ~4% of GDP per annum, and has been for 20 years. The bill for this, when the Russians present it (possibly by driving tanks into places where Russian tanks should not be driven) will be much larger than 40% of GDP. Note also, this is not the only massively problematic military border that the EU has; the Mediterranean, Balkans and Aegean are all available for geopolitical lunacy on demand in the near future.

I’m happy to defer to your knowledge of military topics, but that still doesn’t sound like a reason to blame specially the EU — an organisation which doesn’t have its own military, and whose members mutual defence arrangement explicitly comes second to any NATO obligations that member states might have.

Blame the UK or the USA for not holding Russia to the agreement, if you like, but blaming the EU makes a bit less sense than blaming the OSCE.

The USA wasn't holding talks to draw the Ukraine closer into its sphere of influence. The UK was involved, and I agree - as a part of the EU it deserves a dollop of blame for the resulting mess.

And what a mess.

Agreed. It's a useless metric. It's like the "terrorism threat" color code crap. It'll never come down to a low setting because at the end of the day it's a propaganda tool to make people think a certain way (feel scared, in both cases). Setting it low is the same as turning it off and saying there's nothing to worry about which is totally counter to the goals of the people publishing these indicators.

I know I'm going to get down-voted because being scared of nuclear annihilation is kind of a point of virtue around here but if you take the emotion out of it it becomes pretty clear that the doomsday clock, or any other indicator that acts in a similar manner is nothing more than a propaganda tool. It may be propaganda for something you like but it's still propaganda.

To be fair I don't think it's just a propaganda tool - I think in the case of the terrorism threat levels at least they're ultimately used for justifying higher levels of funding.

Compare it to working in an office - it's almost in your interests to convince others that you're very busy to avoid having more workload.

Propaganda is a neutral term. Gaining collective attention for something which is both true and important is as much propaganda as pushing lies in order to subdue people.