Thread by @bopinion

It’s been 75 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated, and 50 years since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty took effect.

Yet the world is today in greater danger of nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis trib.al/Fvw3fJ7

🇮🇷 Iran appears hellbent on getting nukes and could do so within a year
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia and 🇹🇷Turkey will almost certainly follow suit
🇮🇱 Israel and parts of Asia are already armed trib.al/Fvw3fJ7

To slow this proliferation of nukes, the world relies mostly on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, which has 191 signatories.

The next review conference starts in April: Expectations are low, fears are high trib.al/Fvw3fJ7

The 1960s treaty is a grand bargain:

➡️The countries with nukes (the U.S., Soviet Union, U.K., France and China) keep their nukes but work toward eliminating them.
➡️Others forswear nukes in return for help in using nuclear tech as an energy source trib.al/Fvw3fJ7

Has the treaty been a success? @andreaskluth says: "When analyzed with game theory, the NPT looks like a terrible idea."

By letting all nations gain nuclear tech, it allows them to get one step away from making bombs. The result is a soft arms race trib.al/Fvw3fJ7

@andreaskluth During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union used game theory to find a strategy for avoiding mutually assured destruction. It rested on assumptions:

➡️Both sides must be able to retaliate
➡️Both sides were assumed to be “rational” trib.al/Fvw3fJ7

@andreaskluth The world is now far more complicated and unpredictable:

⬆️The number of potential players keeps growing
⬆️Many new types of weapons

The math quickly gets complex beyond normal human capacities trib.al/Fvw3fJ7

@andreaskluth Game theory offers plenty of reasons to worry, but it also offers a glimmer of hope:

In games and reality, players don’t know or can misread the minds of their adversaries. This can be fixed by adding a mediator.

Let the search be on for such mediators trib.al/Fvw3fJ7