The United States spent seventy years telling everyone to relax because we had the nukes covered. Worked great. Nobody had to think about it. Then we got bored with the whole arrangement and started flaking on treaty obligations like a guy who stops showing up to his own book club.
Now allies are looking around and doing the math. Turns out when you can't count on someone else's missiles to keep you from getting vaporized, you start weighing whether to build your own. Proliferation cascade is the technical term. The common term is oh f*ck everyone's getting nukes.
This is not a minor policy shift. This is South Korea asking if maybe they should start enriching uranium. This is Japan wondering if their pacifist constitution has a loophole for thermonuclear deterrence. This is Poland Googling how much plutonium costs on Alibaba.
Arms control was already dying. Now it's a corpse at a party nobody wants to acknowledge. Nuclear states backed away from commitments. Other countries noticed. Shocking development that when you break promises about weapons that end civilization, people get nervous and want their own.
The risk assessment here is straightforward. More nuclear powers means more chances for someone to have a bad day and hit the wrong button. Or the right button. Depends on your perspective and whether you're the one getting hit.
Retail traders are probably pricing this into their portfolios by buying more Tesla calls because they read somewhere that Elon wants to nuke Mars and figured that's bullish. They have no idea what a proliferation cascade is. They think cascade is a dish soap.
The umbrella is fraying. Countries are getting wet. The natural response is not to fix the umbrella but to let everyone carry their own hydrogen bomb, which has never caused a problem in human history.
Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash
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