A chilling prospect of an apocalyptic nuclear war is now a one in six chance, says a leading scientist who has been working out the odds.
Swede Max Tegmark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, has said that a US- Russian nuclear war is about as likely as losing in “Russian roulette: one in six”.
Ever since the US launched nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of WW2, the threat of a nuclear war has been a possibility but normally an unlikely prospect due to the cataclysmic consequences.
The Cuban missile crisis standoff in 1962 is famously known as a point where the world appeared on the brink of a nuclear war over the USSR deploying ballistic missiles in Cuba.
And now the world is looking on nervously at the Ukraine battleground where Russian leader Vladimir Putin has not had the success he would have hoped for and is using the possibility of nuclear weapons as a threat.
The fear by experts is that as Russia is failing to get its way so far militarily, and has been suffering some defeats recently, that Putin may look at the most extreme weapon in his armoury.
Putin held sham referendums in the four annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, so he now claims they belong to Russia. At the same time he has said that he would use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.
And Tegmark looking into the probability of a nuclear war sees it as worryingly high.
On his research he tweeted: “Here's why I think there's now a one-in-six chance of an imminent global #NuclearWar, and why I appreciate @elonmusk and others urging de-escalation, which is IMHO in the national security interest of all nations."
He believes that if Russia won the war then the possibility of a “Kosovo breaking away from Serbia” style situation could take place in annexed regions led by pro-Russians.
Alternatively if Ukraine won it would be like the US losing in Vietnam.
As both of these possibilities would be impossible to accept for the opposition, Tegmark believes it is more likely that the war carries on.
And with Russia struggling to beat Ukraine, backed by the US and Europe, it could escalate the situation - with the most extreme outcome being nuclear weapons.
He wrote in a blog post : "I view it as highly unlikely (<10%) that Putin would accept 'Vietnam' without first going nuclear, because it would almost certainly result in him being overthrown and jailed or killed.
"On the other hand, I also view it as highly unlikely (<10%) that the West would accept a 'Kosovo' scenario where Russia is granted a peace deal where it keeps everything it's annexed, because if the powers that be in the West were that appeasement-minded, they would presumable have opted for a 'Cuba' scenario in 2021 by acquiescing to Russia's demand that Ukraine never join NATO.
"This means that with high (>80%) probability, the current vicious cycle of escalation will end only with de-escalation into one of the intermediate outcomes ("Libya"/"Korea"/"Finland") or with lower-case "kaboom" (Russian nuclear use in Ukraine)."
He explains that the Libya, Korea and Finland outcomes are: simmering war, frozen war and full peace, respectively.
