In nuclear war, the long-held assumption of mutual assured destruction no longer exists. Welcome to the age of permanent strategic instability, where superpowers mix fast and accurate nuclear and non-nuclear missiles in the same arsenal. The risk of war is greater than many realise.
The scale of catastrophe is also significant. A potential nuclear winter is estimated to amount to billions of deaths from starvation after years of global crop failures. Such risks and consequences are disastrously underestimated.
Nuclear powers have long sought the ability to fight and win a nuclear war. For the United States and its allies, that temptation exists even without the use of nuclear weapons. In 2024, we argued how the US could use non-nuclear strikes to negate Chinese and Russian nuclear deterrents.
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Ryan Snyder at Princeton University similarly concludes that the US’ “long-range air- and sea-based precision conventional cruise missiles possess lethality against missile silos comparable to [US] nuclear ballistic missiles”, well above 90 per cent. Eli Sanchez at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that near-future US hypersonic weapons can defeat silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with “comparable efficacy” to nuclear warheads.
Long-range precision weapons blur the line between nuclear and conventional warfare. They can destroy the same targets as nuclear weapons without the stigma of nuclear use. This turns conventional missiles into credible substitutes for silo-busting nuclear strikes and undermines the retaliatory nuclear credibility of peer rivals.
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A glimpse of this logic came when US President Donald Trump recently deployed two US nuclear submarines to “appropriate regions” in response to Russian threats. Trump publicly boasted of their undetectable presence.