A few years ago I started writing about nuclear weapons because I came to the conclusion that they were morally indefensible, that they posed the greatest existential threat to humanity and I concluded the world was likely to see more (not fewer) countries take the nuclear road. Certainly among the evangelical Christian circles I inhabit, I seemed to be alone in this concern. Not only that but it also rarely appeared in the mainstream press. One invasion by a nuclear armed power later and that has changed dramatically. As Ross Douthat pointed out the world has been riding its luck for 80 years and right now the risks are higher than ever.

The first is simply to be reminded how fortunate the world was to escape a nuclear exchange during the Cold War, when near-misses happened not just during moments of maximal brinkmanship like the Cuban Missile Crisis but also through randomness, coincidence and error. If there’s a path to nuclear war in this century, it will probably feature a similar kind of contingency and accident, the devil taking a hand in ways that can’t be predicted in advance.

Now it seems everyone has a ‘what are the chances of nuclear war’ type article. Here are just a few that I’ve come across in the past month or so:

• How to Stop a Nuclear War by Ross Douthat
• This Is a Uniquely Perilous Moment by David French
• If Putin Deploys a Tactical Nuke, How Should the U.S. Respond? by Bruce Ashford
• Catastrophic thinking on nuclear weapons by Dominic Cummings
• Putin’s actions make no sense. That is his strength by Tim Harford
• Can Russia’s president launch nuclear weapons alone? Twitter thread by Pavel Podvig.
• The risk that the war in Ukraine escalates past the nuclear threshold (The Economist)
• The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone (NYT)
• Biden Sticks With Longstanding U.S. Policy on Use of Nuclear Weapons Amid Pressure From Allies (WSJ)
• Would Russia really launch nuclear weapons? (The Economist)
• Nuclear weapons: Why reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation (Our World in Data)
• Nuclear Expert Comment on Samotsvety Nuclear Risk Forecast (Very long assessment of the nuclear risk)

And there are now hundreds if not thousands more of these kind of articles. Although the interest is much higher thanks to Mr Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine I still haven’t really read any proposing thoughts on how we get away from this nuclear armed world to a non-nuclear world. Given that having nuclear weapons both protect you from attack but also protect you when you attack others how do we change that calculus? How do we persuade those that have nuclear weapons to give them up? I have some thoughts but none of them are particularly appealing and ALL of them are fraught with high-risk.

What was encouraging was that the first three articles listed above were all written by Christians and the first two in mainstream publications. I might respond to Bruce Ashford’s article because he essentially defends America’s right to use nuclear weapons (at least in some forms and in some situations) and I think he’s wrong.

The other thing that struck me is that I haven’t seen anyone yet call for peaceful and civil disobedience against the presence of nuclear weapons, the way say this woman did. Her life of protest obviously didn’t make any difference in her lifetime but sometimes that’s not the point. The protest is the point. The speaking up is the point.

Anyway, the world is worried about nuclear weapons and that is good. That we have more ideas how to mitigate climate change than we do how to mitigate against nuclear weapons, not so much.