Op-ed: The nuclear illusion: mistaking luck for security
By Branka Marijan
November 7, 2025
"Ban the Bomb" march from Caernarfon to Bangor Teitl Cymraeg.
Opinions expressed by contributors are their own.
For most people, nuclear weapons belong to history.
The danger they represent feels distant, almost fictional, the preoccupation of policy wonks and grey-haired strategists. Yet A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, seeks to unravel that complacency. Critics may argue over its cinematic merit, but its real power lies not in spectacle, but in plausibility: a reminder that the atomic threat never vanished, only slipped from view.
The film’s release is well-timed.
Instead of dismantling their arsenals, the nine nuclear-armed states are modernising them. Russia and the United States, which together possess approximately 87 percent of the world’s warheads, are slowing the pace of disarmament. China, once restrained in both rhetoric and capability, now swaggers as it brandishes its growing arsenal. Saudi Arabia hides under Pakistan’s de facto nuclear umbrella. Some commentators even hint at the need for middle powers that have long styled themselves champions of disarmament, such as Canada and Germany, to acquire nuclear weapons.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are transforming nuclear decision-making, and, indeed, everything related to warfare. Algorithms promise to reduce decision times and alter command-and-control structures, thereby increasing the risk of errors.
The nuclear peril of the twenty-first century is not a faded relic of the Cold War. It is more complex, less predictable, and potentially more catastrophic.
A more deadly arms race
Nuclear competition during the Cold War was terrifying but came with rules. Arms control agreements, though imperfect, constrained deployments and created channels of communication.
Today’s nuclear arms race lacks this sense of order. The arms control architecture of the past, which sustained a measure of stability, has steadily eroded.
Russia has openly threatened the use of nuclear weapons. The United States has sharply increased its nuclear weapons budget. China is rapidly expanding its stockpile. India and Pakistan engage in routine military brinkmanship. North Korea regularly issues theatrical nuclear threats. A renewed nuclear crisis with Iran looms.
The new speed of hypersonic missiles reduces warning times. Cyber operations create new vulnerabilities in nuclear command-and-control. The fog of war is thickening, bringing with it the risk of calamitous miscalculation.
Safety as illusion
Proponents of the concept of “nuclear deterrence” insist that nuclear weapons keep the peace, as they did, supposedly, during the Cold War.
But their logic is flawed.
Deterrence assumes rational actors with stable communication. Today’s multipolar nuclear landscape features autocrats facing domestic turmoil, populists intoxicated with nationalism, and leaders willing to gamble with escalation.
Deterrence also assumes reliable technology. Today’s rapidly evolving and incredibly complex systems, from early-warning satellites to AI-driven analytics, are prone to glitches, hacking, and human misinterpretation.
The world has come close to nuclear catastrophe more than once.
In 1983, for example, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov chose not to respond when an alarm, later proved false, indicated incoming American missiles. He averted a nuclear exchange.
In today’s sped up environment, humanity might not be so lucky. Petrov’s understanding of the weaknesses in his early warning system, and his subsequent decision to trust his “gut instinct,” might not have a role in our current world, in which human agency and control over AI systems are being constantly eroded.
Disarmament still matters
Calls for disarmament are often dismissed as naïve. Yet the alternative — accepting nuclear weapons as a permanent feature of international life — is reckless. Nuclear weapons are the only arms capable of destroying civilization in an afternoon.
Disarmament is not an all-or-nothing enterprise. The history of the nuclear age shows that arms control, confidence-building, and verifiable reductions can lower tensions and preserve peace.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union, now Russia, cut arsenals dramatically from Cold War peaks. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, although not yet in force, has created a powerful norm against nuclear testing. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, while dismissed by nuclear-armed states, nonetheless reflects the moral and humanitarian consensus of most of the world’s governments.
Re-energizing such efforts is not utopian but necessary and critical. Even modest steps, such as renewing dialogue between Washington and Moscow, encouraging Chinese transparency, and strengthening crisis-communication mechanisms, could reduce risks. Meanwhile, multilateral forums like the United Nations continue to provide necessary platforms and civil society remains actively engaged.
Time to wake up
Humanity has been lucky in escaping widespread devastation so far.
But luck is not a strategy.
Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to our planet. The only rational way to reduce this threat is to reduce their number, constrain their role, and finally to eliminate them, through persistence, political will, and imagination.
The first step is recognition. The world must face the reality that nuclear warfare is with us, not a distant memory but a present and growing danger. A House of Dynamite is a sobering reminder of that truth, and of how easily fiction can mirror reality.
Written By Branka Marijan
Branka Marijan is a CIGI senior fellow and a senior researcher examining military and security implications of emerging technologies at Project Ploughshares. She is a lecturer in the Master of Global Affairs program at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
A New Nuclear Arms Race Is Looming
- President Donald Trump has ordered preparations to resume U.S. nuclear weapons testing, citing alleged Russian and Chinese violations.
- Moscow and Beijing deny conducting explosive nuclear tests but continue advancing new nuclear-capable weapons systems.
- With arms control treaties collapsing and testing bans under threat, experts warn the world could enter a new era of nuclear escalation.
In June 2019, the director of the Pentagon’s main intelligence agency made an eyebrow-raising allegation about Russia and its nuclear programs: Moscow is testing its atomic weapons.
"The U.S. government, including the Intelligence Community, has assessed that Russia has conducted nuclear weapons tests that have created nuclear yield,” Lieutenant General Robert Ashley said.
China may also be conducting its own tests, Ashley added, possibly by using “zero-yield” methods in which no actual atomic explosion -- a fission chain reaction -- takes place.
Fast forward six years. The United States and Russia are on the verge of a new arms race. The Kremlin is boasting that it is developing new, nuclear-capable superweapons. And President Donald Trump is threatening to resume US nuclear tests.
“Russia's testing and China's testing, but they don't talk about it,” Trump said in an interview with CBS News recorded on October 31. “No, we're gonna test, because they test and others test.”
On November 5, he reiterated that "because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis."
The claim Russia and China are testing is subject to debate.
Regardless, the threat has drawn criticism from Moscow and cheers from US national security hawks, not to mention handwringing among arms control advocates.
After years of collapsed or eroded arms control agreements -- the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Open Skies, New START -- advocates worry that the global pact banning nuclear tests may be next.
At a meeting of Russia’s Security Council on November 5, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov called for preparations to resume nuclear testing -- at ranges on the Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya.
Confused by all the treaties? Don’t know what a “yield” is? We’ve got you covered: Read on.
Testing, Testing
The last time the United States used explosives in its weapons arsenal to split a uranium or plutonium isotope and spark the nuclear chain-reaction known as fission was in the dusty landscape of Nevada in 1992. It wasn’t a mushroom cloud like you see in the movies -- those went out of favor in the 1960s, with a treaty -- but an underground blast.
Moscow’s last fission test of a weapon? That was in 1990, a year before the Soviet collapse, on Novaya Zemlya. Beijing’s was in 1996 at Lop Nur, in the windswept reaches of the far western Xinjiang province.
That same year, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) came into being. Since that time, only Pakistan and India have conducted similar critical tests -- and North Korea has conducted half a dozen, most recently in 2017.
Generally speaking, nuclear tests that involve actual explosions of fissile material are relatively easy to detect.
Highly sensitive seismic monitoring devices, like those that monitor earthquakes, can pick up shock waves from a blast underground, where all tests have occurred for decades. Aircraft equipped with sophisticated “sniffing” equipment can register radioactive isotopes floating into the atmosphere, telltale signs of a nuclear detonation.
Noncritical. Critical. Supercritical.
The end of the Cold War, and of the Soviet-US arms race, meant major cuts to nuclear arsenals and a downgrade of budgets and investments into the infrastructure needed to plan the bombs and build them.
All nuclear-armed countries need to ensure that their arsenals can devastate as they’re expected to, so testing continues -- just not in a mushroom-cloud sort of way. Noncritical tests, in which explosives and fissile material are used but not detonated to cause fission, are allowed under the CTBT. Researchers use supercomputers and powerful lasers to test or mimic fission reactions.
Trump first suggested the possibility of new tests in a social media post just before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea. He expanded on that later in his CBS News interview.
US officials have maintained a test site in Nevada where subcritical experiments have continued. However, doing a full-blown fissile explosion could not happen right away.
“The US could not conduct a test in days or weeks but, depending on the details of the test and the diagnostics, we could resume testing in months to a few years,” said Jill Hruby, a former director of the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and former head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages storage and tests of the US nuclear arsenal.
Energy Secretary Christopher Wright, whose department oversees the NNSA, later clarified Trump’s comments.
"I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests," Wright said in an interview with Fox News on November 2. "These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions."
US authorities have ample data from previous underground testing, plus laboratory testing and subcritical experiments, according to Hruby -- one argument, she said, for not resuming full tests.
“Additionally, if we start testing it is clear others would resume or start testing,” she said. “Once testing is resumed, it is highly likely in my opinion that new types of devices will be explored, fueling more arms racing.
“Finally, while testing can be safe, accidents can occur. I think most people would agree that large-scale nuclear testing is not something that environmentally benefits our planet and humanity,” she said.
Real World Testing
In April, the US State Department released its annual report on countries complying with arms control treaties. The report said Russia had conducted “supercritical” nuclear weapons tests in past years, but failed to notify the US or other countries as required under a 1974 treaty that also put a cap on the size of underground explosive blasts.
“Concerns remain due to these past activities and the uncertainty and lack of transparency relating to Russia’s activities at Novaya Zemlya,” the report said.
Broadly speaking, the term “supercritical” refers to a fission reaction, when an isotope is split and causes a full-blown chain reaction. “Noncritical” or ‘subcritical” do not.
For national security hawks -- in Washington or Moscow or even Beijing -- the world has changed. China, which is not constrained by the soon-expiring New START Treaty between Washington and Moscow, is expanding its arsenal. The Kremlin is modernizing its arsenal and rolling out new intercontinental ballistic missiles like the Sarmat and other nuclear-capable weapons like the Burevestnik and the Poseidon, an unmistakable signal.
Days after Trump’s comments, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a post on X that Trump “was right” about Chinese and Russian testing.
“The United States has to maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles,” Robert O’Brien, who served as White House national-security adviser during Trump’s first term, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article last year. “To do so, Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992 -- not just by using computer models.”
“If China and Russia continue to refuse to engage in good-faith arms control talks, the United States should also resume production of uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the primary fissile isotopes of nuclear weapons,” he wrote.
O’Brien did not respond to a request for comment sent to his Washington firm.
In Moscow, Russian officials have criticized Trump’s pledge to resume testing and denied the accusation that they had conducted actual nuclear tests.
At a televised Security Council meeting at the Kremlin on November 5, President Vladimir Putin echoed Belousov’s remarks and ordered officials to make proposals for the “possible start of work to prepare for nuclear weapons testing.” But he also said Moscow had no intention of violating the CTBT.
If the Trump administration does move forward with full testing, it would likely spark its own race, as other nations -- China first and foremost -- move to resume testing. That would push the CTBT agreement toward outright collapse. Russia “de-ratified” the treaty in 2023; Washington has signed it but not ratified it. Some administration officials have called for “un-signing” it. China has signed but not ratified the pact.
“Explosive testing would open the way for other nations to do the same. They have not done as many tests as the US has and would benefit more from explosive testing,” said Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where US researchers developed the first nuclear weapons in the 1940s.
A return to full-scale testing would also likely doom the New START treaty, which caps the size of the Russian and American nuclear arsenals, experts say. That treaty is due to expire next year, and no negotiations are under way to replace it.
In September, Putin proposed adhering to the treaty’s requirements for a year after it expires in early February, something the White House signaled openness to.
By RFE/RL
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