Fixated on AI, the world has forgotten what is staring it in the face: nuclear annihilation

A nuclear counterattack training exercise at an undisclosed location in North Korea in April 2024. Photograph: KCNA VIA KNS/AFP/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenA nuclear counterattack training exercise at an undisclosed location in North Korea in April 2024. Photograph: KCNA VIA KNS/AFP/Getty ImagesFixated on AI, the world has forgotten what is staring it in the face: nuclear annihilationSimon TisdallThis is no scoffing matter. The accelerating proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons is bringing ‘end times’ closer by the day

Humankind has fearfully and sometimes joyfully anticipated the end of the world ever since it began. The Bible’s Book of Revelation speaks of “end times”, a period of tribulation, war, famine, plague, floods and environmental catastrophe that may seem a less absurd prospect today than perhaps it once did. Islam, too, posits a fateful day of judgment or day of reckoning. Christian evangelicals believe that, in the final rapture, a chosen few – the righteous or the “elect” – will be saved while sinners burn. It’s a minority view. Matthew’s gospel predicts most people will defy, ignore or ridicule warnings of imminent Armageddon. Peter, another of Jesus’s disciples, agreed: “In the last days, scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.” Yet such worldly scepticism does not mean a universal cataclysm is less likely. It may make it more probable.

Donald Trump’s blanket denials of the dangers ostensibly posed by artificial intelligence, whose uncontrolled development is seen by some as the latest harbinger of apocalypse, could be interpreted as fulfilling Peter’s prophecy. This US president, the nearest thing the world has to a one-man doomsday machine, is a great one for scoffing and evil desires. In Robert Harris’s 2019 novel, The Second Sleep, a worried scientist lists half a dozen ways the world might end. They include devastating climate change, pandemic disease, a giant asteroid collision with Earth, or some other overwhelming calamity. Few heed the fictional scientist’s fears. In the event, what destroys him and almost everybody else is a disturbingly plausible cyber crash – a global digital and internet meltdown.

While arguments rage over whether large language models will acquire consciousness and moral agency – and the power to delete humanity – existential AI threats remain, as of now, open to mitigation. In sharp contrast, extraordinary complacency surrounds the most pressing, avoidable and proven human-made threat to life on Earth. It is as if the world has been seized by collective deafness and by a blind refusal to see what’s staring it in the face. This is no scoffing matter. The accelerating, global proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons is bringing real-time “end times” closer to home by the day. The question increasingly is not “if” but “when” limited or full-scale nuclear warfare will erupt. Eighty-one years after Hiroshima, how much longer can our luck hold?

Alarm bells are ringing, if only people would listen. Desperate Vladimir Putin recently threatened to deploy Russia’s entire nuclear arsenal, comprising about 4,400 warheads, against Nato countries if they activated a supposed plan to invade the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad. He offered no evidence for his claim, and it’s true that the frequent Kremlin nuclear sabre-rattling since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine went pear-shaped has diminished Moscow’s credibility. Yet that in itself is destabilising. To work, nuclear deterrence relies on an adversary believing the threat is real. Disbelief invites miscalculation. At the same time, Putin’s inability to halt Ukraine’s conventional drone and missile attacks deep inside Russia may be edging him closer to pressing the nuclear button, possibly in the form of low-yield tactical or “battlefield” nukes.

Trump’s bottom-line justification for the illegal US-Israel war on Iran is his wilfully mendacious claim that Tehran was weeks away from obtaining the bomb. He claims to be protecting the world from nuclear war. Yet his reckless threat, issued at the UN, to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” implies a possible US nuclear attack. Trump’s hypocrisy is stunning. The US is upgrading its nuclear arsenal of 3,700 warheads and may resume nuclear tests. It unreservedly supports Israel’s hidden nuclear weapons programme. And Trump is pursuing a lucrative deal with Saudi Arabia, another bitter foe of Iran, to provide civilian nuclear technology that he knows could be repurposed to make weapons. That has prompted regional countries such as Turkey and Egypt to consider going nuclear.

Similarly perilous trends are evident across Asia. North Korea’s great panjandrum, Kim Jong-un, has succeeded in gaining de facto international acceptance of his country’s status as a nuclear weapons state. South Korea said in August that Pyongyang now possesses up to 120 warheads – which Kim brandishes to intimidate neighbours. All but discarded are the twin principles that underpinned the west’s postwar Korea policy: reunification and denuclearisation. Heedless of first-term humiliations, Trump is again seeking a summit with Kim, whom he bizarrely terms a friend. “As long as I’m around, he [Kim] is going to be fine,” he boasted. Japan and South Korea don’t share his confidence. Both debate acquiring nuclear weapons in self-defence. Meanwhile, China’s president, Xi Jinping, having again bamboozled a fawning Trump at their Washington summit, is reportedly building nukes like there’s no tomorrow – which, at this rate, there may not be.

Addressing the UN general assembly, secretary-general António Guterres warned the world has reached “the most dangerous nuclear moment” since 1989. Global military spending reached nearly $3tn last year, while AI is increasing uncertainty over nuclear command-and-control, the UN was told. Annual spending on nukes is up by 20%. In a new paper published by the non-partisan Arms Control Association (ACA), Daryl Kimball, the head of the ACA in Washington, bemoaned the absence of high-level disarmament talks between the main nuclear powers and the lapsing of strategic arms limitation treaties. “The nuclear sword of Damocles still hangs over all of us. The threat has become more complex, and in the absence of new arms-control breakthroughs, we are headed for an unprecedented three-way buildup of Chinese, Russian, and US nuclear forces,” Kimball warned.

The fragmentation of the rules-based international order provides aggravating context. Trump-era blasphemies – that might makes right, that international law and the non-proliferation treaty’s binding obligation to disarm can be ignored, and that the UN charter and human rights norms don’t apply to authoritarian “strongman” leaders – all grease the slide into nuclear anarchy. Unresolved forever wars in Palestine, Iran, Ukraine, Myanmar, Yemen and Sudan are base components of a third world war. Potentially earth-shattering, too, is the fast-developing contest for control of space, notably the race to build nuclear-powered lunar bases. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, under which more than 130 countries agreed the moon is no one’s property, is now routinely flouted by both governments and billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The weaponising of space by the US and others advances rapidly. Russia, for example, is reportedly developing an orbiting nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapon.

If the human race really is determined to bring the heavens crashing down in a mad dash for eschatological self-destruction, this is the surest, quickest way to go about it. More surprising than the irresponsible behaviour of politicians is the deafening public silence, the absence of large-scale protest in much of the world, the complacency, bordering on indifference, that accompanies this global march to oblivion. If and when a final reckoning comes, individuals who stayed silent will be complicit in their own undoing. Hiroshima is not a shrine. It’s the future.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator