A world in which a growing number of countries have Armageddon weapons may be world that never experiences Armageddon. From Timofey Bordachev of swentr.site:
The West fears nuclear equality – because it fears losing control
The question of nuclear proliferation is no longer hypothetical. It is happening. The only uncertainty now is how quickly it will proceed. In the not-too-distant future, we may see 15 nuclear powers instead of today’s nine. Yet there is little reason to believe this development will fundamentally upend international politics, or bring about global catastrophe.
The invention of nuclear weapons was a technological breakthrough that reshaped global affairs. More than anything else, nuclear weapons define the military hierarchy of states, creating a threat that no government can ignore.
Perhaps their most profound consequence is the emergence of states that are essentially immune to external aggression. This was never true in the long history of war. No matter how powerful a state was, a coalition of rivals could always defeat it. The great empires were vulnerable to invasion. The Enlightenment-era monarchies – including Russia – depended on a balance of power system where no single nation could dominate the rest.
But with nuclear weapons, that balance shifted. Two countries – Russia and the US – now possess such overwhelming destructive capability that neither can be seriously threatened, let alone defeated, even by a coalition. China, too, is gradually joining this exclusive tier, though its arsenal is still a fraction of Moscow’s or Washington’s.
In this sense, nuclear weapons have brought a strange kind of peace: Not from trust, but from terror. War between nuclear superpowers is not only unthinkable, it is politically irrational.
Becoming a nuclear superpower, however, is extremely expensive. Even China, with its vast resources, has only recently begun to approach the scale of Russian and American stockpiles. Few others can afford the same path.
