'Uncharted Territory': Why the Forgotten Threat of Nuclear War Is Real and Present Again

In June 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, was woken with news that 22,000 warheads had been launched at the United States. He decided not to wake his wife, so that she could die in her sleep. The alarm was false. A defective computer chip in the detection system had produced it, and the error was found before any retaliation. It is one of the episodes that author Eric Schlosser recounts in Command and Control, and he returns to it now because he believes the danger it illustrates has come back.

The Irish Times writer who spoke to him grew up in the 1980s convinced that nuclear war would kill everyone. The US and the Soviet Union then pointed tens of thousands of warheads at each other under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Today there are fewer warheads, but enough remain to end human life. Nine countries hold them: the US with 5,748, Russia with 5,580, China with around 500, France with 290, the UK with 225, India with 172, Pakistan with 170, Israel with 90 and North Korea with 50. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says even 0.1 per cent of the world's arsenal would cause devastating agricultural collapse and widespread famine. A recent academic study suggested an exchange between India and Pakistan alone could kill more than two billion people. Vladimir Putin has said Russia would respond with nuclear weapons to any critical threat to its sovereignty, and Israel is responding militarily to Iran, an aspiring nuclear power.

Schlosser was interviewed about his book in 2013, when he felt the threat had been largely forgotten. Now, he says, he is deeply concerned. In his view the world is in uncharted territory with a multipolar arms race, in which China, the US and Russia compete, India and Pakistan are in the mix, and North Korea destabilises things. The old US-Soviet rivalry, he says, seems simple and quaint by comparison.

Alexander Glaser, a Princeton professor who won the American Physical Society's 2025 Leo Szilard Lectureship Award for work on arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament verification, sits on the science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He stressed he was speaking for himself, not the Bulletin. The Bulletin sets the Doomsday Clock, which began in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight and reached its safest point, 17 minutes, in 1991. Since January 2023 it has stood at 90 seconds. Glaser says lower warhead numbers matter little, because today's weapons are far more accurate and reliable at destroying targets.

He traces the unravelling to the years after the optimistic 1990s. The attacks of 9/11 shifted attention to nuclear terrorism, and in 2002 the US withdrew from the antiballistic missile treaty, which angered Moscow. Glaser says Russia's new weapon systems go back to that decision and the world is paying for it now. The INF Treaty collapsed in 2019, and in 2023 Russia suspended its participation in the New START treaty on strategic offensive arms. Even in the 1980s, he notes, the two sides talked to each other.

Deterrence, Schlosser argues, works until it doesn't. Generals and weapons scientists he interviewed were amazed that no city has been destroyed since Nagasaki and that the Cold War ended without deliberate use or accidental detonation. We were lucky, he says. He adds that if he heard tomorrow that a weapon had been detonated, it would not be shocking. He also notes that some in the US argue for building artificial intelligence into nuclear command and control.

The consequences of a first strike are harder to predict now. In the 1980s, Glaser says, it would clearly have meant all-out global thermonuclear war. Today it is unclear how far or how fast a nuclear strike on a Ukrainian city would escalate, since no one knows what a world would look like after first use since 1945. Schlosser says nuclear logic rewards hitting first, so there is pressure to act fast: Israel took a month to calibrate its response to Iran, but a nuclear exchange would not unfold that way. One detonation might be the end of it, or it might lead to hundreds.

Disarmament has reversed. Every nuclear state is modernising its entire weapons complex for the first time since the Cold War ended, Glaser says, and the US is investing $1.7 trillion in its submarines, bombers and land-based missiles. Schlosser says China's arsenal is growing faster than any other. Glaser wants all nuclear states to adopt a no-first-use policy, which the US lacks, a relic of when the Soviets were stronger conventionally. If every state declared one, he says, no one could ever use the weapons.

Meanwhile, non-nuclear states weigh their options. Schlosser says a South Korean graduate student told him all her friends want their own weapons because they doubt the US would defend them after Trump's presidency. If Trump is re-elected, he says, more countries may seek arsenals, and the more states that have them, the likelier one is used, or two, or 10. Public awareness lags: a 1982 anti-nuclear demonstration in Central Park was then the largest in American history, but Dr Strangelove's stage revival and Oppenheimer are treated as period pieces. Glaser fears a mass disarmament movement might only follow another use, and hopes arms control can come first.