This is a claim I’ve made before (lots of times in fact) but this time it was made by someone else. The challenging thing about this issue is that you (and me) as individuals have little to no ability to affect change. Nuclear states are virtually impervious to change. They possess the ultimate weapon and no government has ever given up an advantage like that.

But there are problems.

Because there’s a ban on nuclear testing (we can now tell the difference between a bomb & an earthquake) and you can’t just go dropping bombs we don’t know if our nuclear systems work (Britain’s apparently doesn’t).

And Putin has changed the rules on how we think about the nuclear deterrent. We used to think the deterrent was to stop people attacking each other with nuclear weapons. But Putin has consistently used the nuclear threat to deter countries from trying to stop Russia defeating Ukraine.

So 70 years on from the first nuclear test countries are trying to find new ways of gaining the nuclear upper hand. Russia seems to be focusing on how it can use weapons in space. There are growing pressures which suggest nuclear escalation is not a risk but actually happening.

Not only that but it would seem the threshold for using some for of nuclear weapons (non-strategic, i.e smaller battlefield missiles and not the city destroying nukes we all tend to think of) is lower than we might have imagined.

I write about this because I think we need to see what is happening, not be shocked, and as reasonably as possible assess the risks. Is it likely that a state will use one this year? I think not. Is it likely that wars will increase and more nations will seek to acquire nuclear weapons? Absolutely. And that process will make the world more dangerous and a lot less safe.

Can this trend be reversed? Probably not but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try anyway.