The world is not on a timer that anyone can read, but the guardrails that once made nuclear war a theoretical nightmare rather than an operational subject have thinned. New START, the last treaty that capped deployed American and Russian strategic warheads and allowed inspections, expired in February 2026. For the first time in more than half a century the two largest arsenals sit under no binding numerical limit. Putin offered a voluntary one-year observance of the old ceilings if Washington did the same; that is a political courtesy, not a treaty. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said nuclear deterrence is now "the only thing" preventing a global war because the wider security system is eroding. That sentence is both a boast and a confession. Deterrence only works while both sides believe the other will not fire first and will not misread a conventional disaster as an existential one. The longer a hot war runs on Russia's border with Western targeting, intelligence and long-range Ukrainian strikes into the Russian interior, the more that belief is asked to carry.
Russia's signalling has grown coarser as the conventional war has gone worse. Strategic exercises in 2026 rehearsed nuclear response even to a hypothetical conventional attack. Allies of the Kremlin have spoken of tactical nuclear use in Ukraine as a "good-case scenario." Doctrine already allows nuclear weapons if conventional aggression is judged to threaten the sovereignty or territorial integrity of Russia or Belarus. Intelligence assessments still tend to say actual use remains unlikely unless the regime itself is judged to be at stake, and Western officials have said they see no current signs of a tactical weapon being readied for the field. Those two facts can sit together. Threats are a weapon; they have delayed Western supply and shaped what Ukraine is allowed to hit. They are also a habit that lowers the political cost of the next threat. A limited nuclear demonstration; an uninhabited stretch of Ukraine, the Black Sea, would not be Armageddon. It would collapse the taboo that has held since 1945 and force Washington and NATO into a choice between humiliation and a response whose next rung is also nuclear.
The itch is not only Russian. China is expanding its arsenal outside any trilateral cap. Iran sits on the threshold. Poland's president has spoken of beginning work toward a national nuclear path. If Ukraine is forced into a settlement that looks like defeat, other states will draw the lesson that only a bomb guarantees borders, an argument Snyder has made in the opposite direction from the alarmists who treat every Russian communiqué as a countdown. Proliferation multiplies fingers on triggers; it does not make the original two more careful. Meanwhile both Moscow and Washington modernise delivery systems, store thousands of warheads beyond the old deployed counts, and operate in a world where AI compresses decision time even if no government is foolish enough to let a model launch.
Closer, then, does not mean imminent. It means the treaties are gone, the rhetoric is cheaper, the conventional war keeps producing occasions for miscalculation, and the people who would have to stop an escalation have fewer agreed numbers and fewer inspectors. Apathy is a luxury of populations that assume someone else is watching the clock. The clock is not at zero. It is no longer bolted to the wall.
https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/closer-to-nuclear-war-russia-pledges