With the expiration of New Start earlier this year, there are no nuclear arms control agreements in effect between the US and Russia, which hasn’t been the case since the 1960s. Russia, China, and the US are all actively modernizing and developing new nuclear capabilities. China has been greatly expanding their nuclear arsenal, building hundreds of new silos. North Korea has an expansive set of tactical and strategic nuclear systems and are in strategic cooperation with Russia. Russia is 4 years into a destabilizing land war, have developed several new weapons systems, and are now in a nuclear weapon sharing agreement with Belarus. And I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of other things.
We are in a period of strategic instability and an arms race that is unlike anything we have seen in the last 50 years. You can quibble with the specifics all you want, but I don’t think anyone can argue that we are at a lesser risk of nuclear war that we were, say, 20 or 30 years ago
Russia is bankrupt, and can't develop anything because it sent its best and brightest people to be drone fodder, and they died. If there's a new nuclear power it will be Iran, and if there's a nuclear first strike it will be by Israel.
Risk of any use of nuclear weapons is quite different from "nuclear annihilation". There are vastly fewer and vastly less powerful nuclear bombs/warheads today than 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago.
The shelling of Mauripol in Ukraine at the beginning of the current war was roughly equivalent to Hiroshima in explosive yield. It had a lot more destructive power though, since it was distributed across a huge amount of explosions, and blast damage falls approximately with the square of distance to center of explosion.
Mauripol in 2022 was not a place you wanted to be in. When a bomb falls on top of you, it makes no difference if it is small nuclear or large conventional, you very much die anyway.
I'm not trying to make war seem nice or sell the idea that the world is heading in a great direction, I'm trying to make the point that nuclear annihilation is less of a threat today than before.
In addition, usage of tactical nuclear weapons comes up again and again from Russian sources, driven by the situation in the Ukraine war.
Plus the current US President has purged most of of the military leaders who might resist any unwise or unlawful orders regarding nuclear weaponry. (Or just in-general, for that matter.) Potential orders he mused-about during his first term.
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/military-officials-ousted-r...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2024/10...
Yeah, the US regime has basically been speed running the impotent dictator's playbook. Start from a place of weakness and incompetence, and cause a bunch of senseless destruction to distract from it. Using tactical nuclear weapons would be right in line with that, especially after having started this quagmire in Iran with no way to win.