While arguments rage over whether large language models will acquire consciousness and moral agency – and the power to delete humanity – existential AI threats remain, as of now, open to mitigation. In sharp contrast, extraordinary complacency surrounds the most pressing, avoidable and proven human-made threat to life on Earth.

It is as if the world has been seized by collective deafness and by a blind refusal to see what’s staring it in the face. This is no scoffing matter. The accelerating, global proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons is bringing real-time “end times” closer to home by the day. The question increasingly is not “if” but “when” limited or full-scale nuclear warfare will erupt. Eighty-one years after Hiroshima, how much longer can our luck hold?

Alarm bells are ringing, if only people would listen. Desperate Vladimir Putin recently threatened to deploy Russia’s entire nuclear arsenal, comprising about 4,400 warheads, against Nato countries if they activated a supposed plan to invade the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad. He offered no evidence for his claim, and it’s true that the frequent Kremlin nuclear sabre-rattling since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine went pear-shaped has diminished Moscow’s credibility. Yet that in itself is destabilising. To work, nuclear deterrence relies on an adversary believing the threat is real.

Disbelief invites miscalculation. At the same time, Putin’s inability to halt Ukraine’s conventional drone and missile attacks deep inside Russia may be edging him closer to pressing the nuclear button, possibly in the form of low-yield tactical or “battlefield” nukes.

Trump’s bottom-line justification for the illegal US-Israel war on Iran is his wilfully mendacious claim that Tehran was weeks away from obtaining the bomb. He claims to be protecting the world from nuclear war. Yet his reckless threat, issued at the UN, to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” implies a possible US nuclear attack. Trump’s hypocrisy is stunning.

Tomorrow Stephen Miller, Trump and Netanyahu could decide to nuke Iran and then russia would follow suit and nuke Ukraine and we would be off to the races. This unfortunately in my opinion is a very possible outcome.