I t’s hard to feel good about the prospects for humanity when someone tells you there’s a 40 percent chance, more or less, that AI bots will kill us all before the Yankees can win another championship. Nonetheless, some experts in Washington find hope in the history of nuclear arms. It’s easy to forget now that for a half century during the Cold War, Americans lived every day with odds of extinction that felt well above four in ten. But the worst did not come to pass, and policymakers are seizing on this as a model. Most recently, Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley congressman and Democratic presidential hopeful, has called for an international AI treaty with inspections among countries, modeled explicitly after the nuclear arms deals that kept Americans and Soviets from killing each other.
Even the most hopeful proponents of a Cold-War framework for AI will admit that the comparison is imperfect. After all, humans had control over nuclear arsenals; the missiles were never going to launch themselves. And for most of the 20th century, there was very little danger that some non-state terrorist group was going to build its own nuke — whereas every teenager in the world has access to Claude Code. These trifling points aside, though, I worry about the Cold War analogy for an entirely different reason: it assumes that the threat from nuclear weapons is a bygone chapter in our history, successfully concluded. That strikes me as dangerously naive, because while everyone is suddenly fixated on what could happen when rogue agents hack into water supplies, the specter of nuclear confrontation has been quietly creeping back toward terrifying plausibility.
At the center of this gathering storm are what the war planners call “tactical nukes,” which are essentially scaled-down nuclear weapons, more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki and yet unregulated by existing treaties. The theory behind a tactical nuke is that it can vaporize a military or infrastructure target without annihilating an entire country. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use such a weapon in Ukraine — a threat analysts have generally regarded as posturing. But you have to wonder how long Putin is willing to grind on to no foreseeable end, his own country targeted daily by drone strikes and his public turning against the war, if he thinks he has a weapon in his back pocket that can break the Ukranians once and for all.
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The thing that would normally make that implausible — and has to this point — is Russian fear of how the Americans might respond. But things are more complicated now that Donald Trump has created his own frustrating quagmire in the Middle East, from which he’s found no obvious means of escape. At various times this year, Trump has issued vague and ominous warnings to Iran’s leaders about what he might do if they didn’t surrender, promising to bring them “back to the Stone Ages” and that “an entire civilization will disappear.” (Hard to believe the Nobel Committee keeps snubbing him for the peace prize.) Trump recently told Newsmax that he wasn’t referring to nukes — just a really, really big bomb — and has no intention of using them in Iran. But you know, Trump says a lot of things, and a lot of them turn out to be unreliable.
It’s clear, too, that Trump doesn’t really care what happens to Ukraine or what it means for Europe; if he did, he wouldn’t have broken with NATO countries again this month by agreeing to buy billions of dollars worth of Russian diesel fuel. So you couldn’t really blame the Russians if they thought that Trump would abide a nuclear strike in Ukraine, especially if it gave him a good excuse to do whatever he wanted in Iran. History has turned on flimsier assumptions.
And while the Cold War powers openly flirt with nuclear strikes, the world order that once acted as a breaker is fast deteriorating, leaving chaos in its wake. The war in Iran has already ignited regional clashes in Lebanon, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. Russian sabotage in Europe has NATO countries fortifying their borders. China eyes Taiwan, India moves against its Muslims. Multilateral alliances are breaking down everywhere. It all has the feel of pre-World War I entropy, one spark away from total conflagration — the difference this time being that several potential combatants have nuclear arsenals, and the two declining empires who used to police those weapons have instead devised a more elegant way to use them.
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Experts I’ve talked to in the past few months are divided on whether it’s alarmist or reasonable to worry about a resurgent nuclear threat. One told me Putin would never risk the incurring the wrath of the Chinese, who are dead set against the use of tactical nukes. Another posited that Trump might be the first to strike if he thought he could get away with it. On one thing, at least, the experts who have war-gamed these scenarios seem to agree: if either country uses a tactical nuke, the chance that things escalates from there is a good bit higher than 40 percent.
STRANGE AS IT SOUNDS, the world’s record on nuclear arms stands out as one of the great success stories in human history. Never before has any technological leap in mass killing been used only once and then contained. And this despite the fact that it wasn’t just the two great powers in the world who possessed the technology to make a bomb, but several countries with less stable governments and considerably less to lose — Pakistan, North Korea, at one point even Libya. At the dawn on the Cold War, it would have seemed almost preposterous to suggest that 70 more years could pass without a single nuclear detonation, even as two ideologies squared off for preeminence and dozens of ethnic conflicts raged in every part of the world. And yet here we are.
We had close calls, certainly. There was the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1963. Five years later, a NATO war-game exercise codenamed Able Archer confused the Soviets and very nearly triggered a nuclear response. India and Pakistan came perilously close to trading blows in 1999. That such close calls were rare, and that none of them ended with a mushroom cloud, is a testament to remarkable statecraft all around — and especially in the United States, where policymakers came to understand early on that nuclear forces had to be deployed as deterrents to war rather than the means to win one. A series of American presidents negotiated treaties with a hated foe, extracted commitments from the rest of the world, and navigated tense international crises without ever considering a nuclear first strike. Some took a more bellicose tone than others, and not all were very good presidents, but every one of them were serious men who did their part to further a legacy of restraint. Our survival was not an accident.
Then, of course, came Trump, who was asked, in a Republican debate in 2015, about the “nuclear triad” (air, land, and sea-based missiles) and looked as though the moderator were speaking Aramaic. “I think, for me, nuclear is just the power,” Trump sputtered. “The devastation is very important to me.” In office, Trump has unraveled international treaties (including the last existing arms agreement with the Russians), hurled contempt at NATO allies, and waved away international law. He likes to say that his war in Iran is about keeping nuclear arms out of the ayatollahs’ hands, but that wasn’t the first rationale he offered or even the most persuasive. Trump’s only real foreign policy objective seems to be profit. His idea of statecraft is to wrangle a free plane and sell some crypto.
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It’s not just Trump, sadly. Most of the politicians in Washington now are amateurs who seem profoundly less interested in history and policymaking than their Cold War predecessors. And this is what connects the potential crises of AI and nuclear war. (You can throw in climate change, too.) At a moment where we face more existential perils at once than ever before, a generation of leaders plays around with TikTok and TMZ, focusing on specious conspiracy theories — Jeffrey Epstein’s death, the tyranny of vaccines — while the world spirals out of control. You can imagine how a Bill Clinton, say, would have jumped at the chance to take on the complexities of AI and tactical nukes, cementing his legacy in the process. Trump’s vision of legacy is to tear down the Kennedy Center and raise up an arch.
We’re in a race against time now — the question is whether we can install a more serious-minded government, or if Congress and the Courts can manage to rein in the one we have, before humanity is overrun by AI bots or A-bombs or whatever else is headed our way. Technology alone won’t destroy us. Triviality just might.