"Baker Day" US blast at Bikini Island in the Pacific, July 25, 1946.
Source: National Archives/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
Welcome to the New Nuclear Age. It's Even More Chaotic.
China’s rise, Russia’s aggression and America’s unreliability could fuel a wave of atomic-weapons proliferation.
Nuclear weapons focus the mind. So when India and Pakistan fight, the world watches, because any clash between the two could become the first nuclear war since 1945.
The most recent round of their subcontinental contest seems to have settled, thanks partly to US intervention. Just a day after Vice President JD Vance scoffed that the quarrel was none of America’s business, he was working the phones to stop a slide down the slippery nuclear slope. But if this crisis has ebbed, the nuclear peril hasn’t. The world is entering a new nuclear era, one more complex, and potentially far less stable, than the nuclear eras that came before.