For nearly eight decades, humanity has avoided a nuclear war. Barely.

Many credit the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) for maintaining the nuclear peace. They believe that if two adversaries have the power to destroy each other, neither side will risk starting a conflict. The idea seems logical and has undoubtedly discouraged nuclear aggression in the past.

But MAD is not foolproof. Nothing is. It has nearly failed on several occasions that we publicly know about, and it only takes once with nuclear weapons.

Some “experts” estimate the risk of nuclear war to be less than one in a million each day. That is an extremely small and comforting number. One chance in a million that a nuclear disaster will strike this very day? A million days is over 2,700 years. An average person might live 80 years. Pretty good odds, it would seem.

But other analysts estimate the risk of a nuclear war each day to be in the low thousands. The exact odds are impossible to say, but an approximate average of “expert” opinions about the daily odds of having a nuclear war seems to be about one in 100,000.

That number also seems small enough to be lost in the background of daily life. But even a small daily risk accumulates with time. 100,000 days is about 273 years – nearly a third of which has already passed since nuclear weapons were used during WWII.

The real problem is how time, not to mention the mathematical Law of Probability, eventually turns the unlikely into the inevitable. We need only witness those terrifying incidents where MAD has already come to the brink of failure to understand a deeper truth:

The possibility of having a nuclear war on any given day is greater than we think.

Risk Versus Consequences

More than the odds are involved. More important are the stakes. The consequences of failure cannot be truly imagined.

A one in 100,000 chance each day might be acceptable if a little bad luck could be lived with. But nuclear war is not in that category. It changes everything. It can destroy our civilization. A single miscalculation, a mechanical failure, or even a simple mistake could lead to a nuclear winter where agricultural food production was impossible for years. Only a handful of those with secret, expensively-equipped and well-stocked underground bunkers will survive.

The rest will die from starvation.

An Unwilling Gamble

Most of the world’s citizens want nuclear weapons eliminated. But they have no say in the matter. They have no influence on nuclear doctrine – no vote on policies that dictate how and when nuclear weapons are used. Three-quarters of humanity would outlaw nukes if they could, but they can’t even get ICBMs taken off high-alert.

Instead, everyone on Earth is forced to live under the constant threat of nuclear war. A threat where the consequences of equipment failure, miscommunications, false alarms, human error, or unforeseen circumstances are magnified exponentially by the power of the atom.

History has already revealed that our situation with nuclear weapons is terribly fragile. We have been close to devastating nuclear wars several times in the past. Most people know little-to-nothing about those terrifying incidents, but each one exposed how an ordinary day could end in a nuclear apocalypse.

And how much luck has played a part.

The Arithmetic of Anxiety

Consider the facts:

If the daily odds of nuclear war are one in 100,000, then the odds are nearly one in three that it will happen in an average person’s lifetime. The longer nuclear weapons exist, the closer that day of reckoning becomes.

We roll the nuclear dice with every sunrise. The wrong number will eventually come up if the status quo remains unchanged.

The Illusion of Control

Nuclear deterrence demands perfection from imperfect systems:

• Perfect communications
• Perfect decision-making
• Perfect technology

And now, in today’s digital world – perfect software. But perfection is unattainable. The mathematical Law of Probability always wins in the end. Always.

There will be no warning for those in the blast zone if a nuclear strike occurs. But they would consider themselves the lucky ones if they knew the fate of unprepared survivors.

The Path Forward

At Our Planet Project Foundation, we have no idea what the odds are that a nuclear war will happen on any given day.  No one does.

But whatever they are, they’re not good enough. Not when losing means losing the civilization we worked so hard to build. Yet there is an option if we refuse to define our likelihood of survival in terms of probability and chance. As it turns out, a nuclear war is impossible if nuclear weapons are eliminated.