My generation grew up in the shadow of a possible nuclear war. I was born a few months after the Cuba missile crisis — the closest humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a big political force as I was growing up.
My children’s generation are much more likely to demonstrate against climate change than nuclear weapons. Leading politicians also no longer worry so much about nukes. Nuclear arms-control negotiations, a staple of the cold war, have fallen into abeyance. But this relatively relaxed attitude is having a paradoxical effect. It seems to be making countries armed with nuclear weapons more willing to risk military confrontation with each other.
There are three international rivalries where tensions between nuclear-weapons states are reaching dangerous levels. The biggest current risk is on the China-India border — where recent clashes have led to 21 Indian fatalities and an unknown number of Chinese casualties. Military tensions are also rising between China and the US in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the crisis in Belarus has led to fears of Russian military intervention, which would put Nato on alert.