☢️ Nuclear & WMD Threat

Background: why this matters

Nuclear war is one of the few human-made events that could kill a large share of humanity in a single day and damage civilisation for years afterwards. Nine countries hold nuclear weapons, and the Federation of American Scientists estimates the world's total stockpile at roughly 12,000 warheads, the vast majority held by the United States and Russia. Beyond the blast and radiation, climate researchers have modelled how smoke from burning cities could block sunlight and cause crop failures worldwide. A 2022 study in Nature Food estimated that a large US–Russia war could put billions of people at risk of starvation.

Nuclear weapons have been used in war only twice, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The closest calls since have mostly been crises and accidents rather than deliberate decisions. The best known are the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and the 1983 incident in which Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov judged a satellite warning of incoming US missiles to be a false alarm. Arms control treaties then cut the superpowers' arsenals sharply from their Cold War peak. Chemical and biological weapons are banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention, though both have been violated.

Today the arms-control system is weaker than at any time in decades. Russia suspended its participation in New START, the last treaty limiting US and Russian strategic forces, in February 2023, and the treaty was due to expire in February 2026. China is expanding its arsenal, North Korea continues to develop missiles, and military strikes on Iran's nuclear programme have raised tensions in the Middle East. In January 2026 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest in its history, citing nuclear risk among other threats.

Nuclear danger can't be measured directly in real time, so this factor measures attention. The GDELT Global Knowledge Graph tags millions of news articles with themes, including one for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). We sample the last 24 hours and measure what share of all articles carry that tag. Calibration showed the share jumps during genuine crises: it hit 2.49% on 27 February 2022, when Russia put its nuclear forces on alert, against about 0.2–0.3% on quiet days. It's a crisis thermometer, not a probability of war. Coverage of disarmament talks or an anniversary also counts as WMD coverage.

What experts watch: nuclear threats and changes in doctrine, weapons tests, crises between nuclear-armed neighbours (India and Pakistan, the Korean peninsula), attacks on or near nuclear power plants such as Zaporizhzhia, the future of US–Russia arms control, and whether more countries seek their own weapons.