Mutual Assured Existence: A World Where Every Nation Has the Bomb

What if every country on Earth had the bomb?

It sounds like the premise of a thriller. It reads like tomorrow's news.

In Mutual Assured Existence, one of the most urgent thought experiments of our time is pursued to its logical - and terrifying - conclusion. Beginning with the fractures already visible in today's world: Russia's nuclear threats over Ukraine, Iran weeks from weaponization, North Korea's unchecked arsenal, and an NPT regime held together with diplomatic tape and wishful thinking, this book traces the cascade that could take humanity from nine nuclear states to one hundred and ninety-five.

The result is not science fiction. It is geopolitics pushed to its edge.

What happens to NATO when Poland can deter Russia on its own? How does the United States project power when Tuvalu has a warhead? What does deterrence mean when the mathematics of accidental war make catastrophe near-certain within decades? And what does it do to a civilization - its art, its economies, its children's sense of the future - to live forever in the shadow of guaranteed annihilation?

Drawing on real history, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the A.Q. Khan proliferation network to the Budapest Memorandum that left Ukraine defenseless, this book is both a warning and a map. It takes seriously the optimists who argue that nuclear weapons have kept the peace, and demolishes the comfortable assumption that what has worked for eighty years will work forever.

Mutual Assured Existence is the book for anyone who has ever wondered whether the world's most dangerous weapons are truly under control - and suspects, with good reason, that they are not.

The window is narrowing. The arithmetic is unforgiving. The time to pay attention is now.

"A tour de force of strategic imagination - essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where the world is actually headed."