A World in Chaos

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, 22 Dec 2025

Ivana Nikolić Hughes, Ph.D. | Nuclear Age Peace Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service

 

 

Nuclear disarmament should be the first step in unraveling the chaos.

Today, we find ourselves in a world in chaos. It is a world in which the globe is warming at an alarming pace, matched perhaps only by the rate of progress of AI, with the jury still out on even the qualitative sign of its contributions to society. It is a world in which the divisions between the haves and the not haves, within and across societies, echo with the vibes of the Gilded Age, while all other kinds of social disagreements keep the crowds busy arguing on social media and elsewhere. It is a world in which birth rates are collapsing across the developed world, leading to degradation of the family unit, an essential building block of thriving communities. And then there is the possibility of nuclear annihilation, lurking in the background, threatening at any moment to disrupt the life chain that has led to us being here following billions of years of evolution.

Because I teach first year college students and my own children, ages 14, 20, and 24, are now either young adults or reaching that stage, I often think about the time that I was their age, which was in the 1990s. I came to the US as a foreign exchange student my senior year in high school in 1994. At the time, my own country of Yugoslavia was falling apart, so I knew and experienced chaos at the national level. But what we’re experiencing today is different because chaos seems to be the state of everything from family to local to national to international levels.

It is precisely because so many things contribute to the chaos, that the existential threat of nuclear weapons and the need for nuclear disarmament is largely out of view, forgotten, ignored, or worse, justified. When it comes to this topic, things could not be more different today than they were in the 1990s. Of course, this was the end of the Cold War and in 1994, the year that I came to the United States, the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists stood at 17 minutes to midnight, the furthest it had ever been from midnight, with midnight denoting nuclear annihilation. Today, the clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to human destruction of life on the planet via nuclear war and other anthropogenic means.

Why does this matter when so much else seems to be going in the wrong direction? Below I outline three key points and argue that nuclear disarmament should in fact be the first step in unraveling the chaos.

Currently, nine countries in the world possess 12,500 nuclear warheads, most of which are far more powerful than the bombs that were used in attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. All of these states are involved in hot wars and conflicts like Ukraine or the Middle East, or in adversary tensions and potential conflicts. While there is of course danger that a nuclear weapon could be used deliberately, in times of such widespread conflicts and tensions, arguably a bigger worry may be that an accident or a miscalculation will lead to the use of nuclear weapon quite simply because a leader might believe their country is under attack or is about to be attacked. This could happen in the fog of war or due to a technical glitch alone. The risk of the use of a single nuclear weapon is both real and high.

War games from Washington DC have shown repeatedly that the use of a single nuclear weapon under many different scenarios would lead to a full-blown nuclear war. It’s not just that most simulations suggest a spiral into a nuclear war, it’s that all of them do. Part of this is a result of long-standing policies such as launch-on-warning, but part of it is due to the time scales involved in such decisions, which are only getting shorter and shorter.

Nuclear weapons are different from other weapons because they threaten to kill hundreds of millions of people in a matter of minutes, not days or hours. At the same time, nuclear war would alter the environmental conditions on the planet by destroying the ozone layer and altering the climate in the most dramatic way we refer to as nuclear winter. Nuclear winter and the resulting nuclear famine alone are estimated to result in the deaths of billions of people depending on the exact scenario of the nuclear war that takes place. This quite simply would be the end of the world as we know it. For this reason alone, nuclear weapons must be eliminated. In the words of John F. Kennedy, we must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us, as he stated in 1961 during his address to the United Nations General Assembly.

There is more of course to the nuclear threat than the mere possibility of annihilation. There are the wasted resources in all of the nuclear armed states, but especially in the United States, which spends more on nuclear weapons than all of the other nuclear possessors combined. There are the people who have been harmed since the beginning of the nuclear age, from the victims and survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan to communities around the world who were subjected to the fallout, radiation, and displacement due to nuclear testing.

But there is also the insidious way in which the notion that nuclear weapons keep us safe – and I posit that nothing could be further from the truth – undermines our ability to cooperate genuinely and to treat other countries as collaborators in addressing various threats to humanity and the planet and in creating a better world. What we are currently doing is basing the foundation of human security on threats of annihilation. Until such thinking is eradicated, resources are redirected for human needs inside the nations that possess nuclear weapons and beyond, and genuine cooperation is established at the international level, we will continue to not just be in a state of chaos, but to teeter on the brink of the ultimate destruction.

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This essay is adapted from a presentation at the webinar A World in Chaos: Collapse and/or Restructuring held on 16 Nov 2025.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes, Ph.D. is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a senior lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Her writing has appeared in TRANSCEND Media Service, The Hill, The Nation, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scientific American, Truthout, Common Dreams, The Diplomat, and elsewhere. wagingpeace.org

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 22 Dec 2025.

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