Finger on the button

Nine nations now hold about 12,241 warheads, all led by men: Russia (Vladimir Putin), the US (Donald Trump), China (Xi Jinping), France (Emmanuel Macron), the UK (Keir Starmer), India (Narendra Modi), Pakistan (Shehbaz Sharif), Israel (Benjamin Netanyahu), and North Korea (Kim Jong Un), listed in order of nuclear arsenal size.

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The concentration of such destructive power in one gender is alarming. We urgently need institutions that ensure gender balance and create space for dissent in nuclear decision-making

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, expires on 5 February 2026. Moscow has proposed voluntarily keeping its limits for just one more year, a departure from the previous five-year extension. While Russia is still awaiting a formal reply, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the resumption of nuclear testing in response to alleged covert tests by Russia, China, and Pakistan, a claim that immediately went critical, triggering a chain reaction of similar statements worldwide, with Moscow and Beijing in particular warning of reciprocal action.

Even a limited nuclear exchange, a 2022 study in Nature Food (Xia et al.) shows, involving just 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons would drop global temperatures by about 5°C, cause agricultural yields to plummet by 10-40 per cent, trigger a severe nuclear winter, and leave about 5.3 billion starved people within two years. Trump himself has admitted the existing stockpile can "blow up the world 150 times." After the first round, who will bother with the other 149? Kathryn Bigelow's movie A House of Dynamite captures the agony of time-pressured nuclear decision-making, whether to retaliate and risk annihilation or hold fire and lose Chicago.

Real-world events have been even more dramatic. The Russia-Ukraine war, Middle East and Korean tensions, and incidents such as India's accidental missile launch into Pakistan in 2022 show how close the world remains to catastrophe. Disasters have been averted only by restraint: John F. Kennedy's blockade during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, or Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov's refusal to act on a false alarm in 1983. Humanity survived, so far, by luck.