The new nuclear age: a journey into the unknown

[F]or almost 30 years, no warning of a missile attack on the United States was ever very plausible. The alert on Jan. 13, by contrast, was extremely plausible. Commuters on their way to work pulled over to make final phone calls to loved ones; parents reportedly tried to hide their children in sewers…The age of innocence is over. Americans once again live in a world where death can descend from the skies with just a few minutes’ notice.

One of the most popular myths of our recent age of innocence was that a rules-based international order had taken such deep root that no state would ever again consider the first use of force to be legitimate…

But the world has to wake up from even the happiest dreams…The cost-benefit calculations that had for so long made missile launches unimaginable have been transformed in two ways, which we might call bottom-up and top-down…

During much of the Cold War, the resources needed to go nuclear were so great that few countries could even consider it. By the late 20th century, however, dozens of countries had enough money and scientific ability to make the question one worth thinking about…

An Asian continent crowded with nuclear-armed states is a terrifying prospect. But some strategists now worry that if governments in Europe grow sufficiently worried about the reliability of American nuclear support against Russian revanchism, the Continent could soon become a more dangerous place than it was even in 1914…

Here’s where the top-down set of threats comes in. We should perhaps not be too surprised that the United States’ unprecedented, full-spectrum military dominance is now eroding. After all, the British Empire — the closest thing to a globocop the world had seen before 1991 — followed a similar trajectory. Both the United Kingdom and the United States prospered by wielding an invisible fist that guaranteed the function of a global system of free trade only to find that as their trading partners prospered, it became harder and harder for them to maintain their ascendancy. In the case of the British Empire, the story ended badly. By 1890, revisionist governments — above all in Germany — were increasingly concluding that the globocop could not police its beat and that the potential costs of using force were falling below the potential benefits. The result was the First World War.