The world has grown fixated on artificial intelligence while overlooking the proven and escalating danger of nuclear annihilation, Guardian Opinion columnist Simon Tisdall has argued, warning that the accelerating spread of advanced nuclear weapons is bringing “end times” closer by the day.
His column appeared as the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, told the general assembly that the world had reached “the most dangerous nuclear moment” since 1989.
Tisdall wrote that existential risks linked to AI remain, for now, open to mitigation, whereas what he described as the most pressing, avoidable and proven human-made threat to life on Earth is met with extraordinary complacency.
He said the question is increasingly not “if” but “when” limited or full-scale nuclear warfare will erupt, and asked how much longer luck could hold 81 years after Hiroshima.
The columnist opened by noting that humanity has anticipated the end of the world since its beginning, citing the Book of Revelation’s account of “end times” — a period of tribulation, war, famine, plague, floods and environmental catastrophe that he suggested may look less absurd today than it once did.
He also referenced Islam’s day of judgment or reckoning, and the belief among Christian evangelicals that a chosen few, the righteous or “elect”, will be saved in a final rapture while sinners burn.
Tisdall described such warnings as a minority view, pointing to Matthew’s gospel, which he said predicts most people will defy, ignore or ridicule warnings of imminent Armageddon, and to the disciple Peter’s assertion that “in the last days, scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.” Worldly scepticism, he added, does not make a universal cataclysm less likely — it may make it more probable.
He suggested that Donald Trump’s blanket denials of the dangers ostensibly posed by artificial intelligence could be read as fulfilling Peter’s prophecy, describing the US president as the nearest thing the world has to a one-man doomsday machine.
Tisdall invoked Robert Harris’s 2019 novel The Second Sleep, in which a worried scientist lists half a dozen ways the world might end, including devastating climate change, pandemic disease, a giant asteroid collision with Earth or another overwhelming calamity. Few heed the fictional scientist’s fears, and what destroys him and almost everyone else is a disturbingly plausible cyber crash — a global digital and internet meltdown.
Turning to Russia, Tisdall noted that 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 wrote that Putin offered no evidence for the claim, and that frequent Kremlin nuclear sabre-rattling since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine went pear-shaped has diminished Moscow’s credibility — which is itself destabilising, since deterrence depends on an adversary believing the threat is real and disbelief invites miscalculation.
At the same time, Tisdall argued, 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.
On Iran, he wrote that 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, and that the president claims to be protecting the world from nuclear war. Yet Trump’s reckless threat, issued at the UN, to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” implies a possible US nuclear attack, Tisdall said.
He described Trump’s hypocrisy as stunning, noting that the US is upgrading its nuclear arsenal of 3,700 warheads and may resume nuclear tests, unreservedly supports Israel’s hidden nuclear weapons programme, and is pursuing a lucrative deal with Saudi Arabia to provide civilian nuclear technology that he knows could be repurposed to make weapons. That deal, he added, has prompted regional countries such as Turkey and Egypt to consider going nuclear.
Tisdall said similarly perilous trends are evident across Asia. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, he wrote, has succeeded in gaining de facto international acceptance of his country’s status as a nuclear weapons state, and South Korea said in August that Pyongyang now possesses up to 120 warheads, which Kim brandishes to intimidate neighbours.
The twin principles that underpinned the west’s postwar Korea policy — reunification and denuclearisation — have been all but discarded, according to Tisdall. He noted that Trump, heedless of first-term humiliations, is again seeking a summit with Kim, whom he bizarrely terms a friend, and boasted that “as long as I’m around, he” — Kim — “is going to be fine”.
Japan and South Korea do not share that confidence and both debate acquiring nuclear weapons in self-defence, Tisdall wrote. He added that China’s president, Xi Jinping, having again bamboozled a fawning Trump at their Washington summit, is reportedly building nukes like there is no tomorrow — which, at this rate, there may not be.
Addressing the UN general assembly, Guterres warned that the world has reached the most dangerous nuclear moment since 1989, Tisdall noted. Global military spending reached nearly $3tn last year, the UN was told, while AI is increasing uncertainty over nuclear command-and-control, and annual spending on nukes is up by 20%.
In a new paper published by the non-partisan Arms Control Association, its Washington-based head, Daryl Kimball, 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.
Tisdall said the fragmentation of the rules-based international order provides aggravating context. He cited 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 do not apply to authoritarian “strongman” leaders — as factors greasing the slide into nuclear anarchy.
He described unresolved forever wars in Palestine, Iran, Ukraine, Myanmar, Yemen and Sudan as base components of a third world war, and pointed to the fast-developing contest for control of space, notably the race to build nuclear-powered lunar bases.
According to Tisdall, 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, while the weaponising of space by the US and others advances rapidly. Russia, he noted, is reportedly developing an orbiting nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapon.
He argued that if the human race is determined to bring the heavens crashing down in a mad dash for eschatological self-destruction, this is the surest and quickest way to do it.
More surprising than the irresponsible behaviour of politicians, he wrote, is the deafening public silence, the absence of large-scale protest in much of the world, and a complacency bordering on indifference accompanying this global march to oblivion.
Tisdall concluded that if and when a final reckoning comes, individuals who stayed silent will be complicit in their own undoing, adding: “Hiroshima is not a shrine. It’s the future.”
COMMENTS