As the world became more dangerous in 2024, the use of its most dangerous weapons has become more likely.

This trajectory raises the stakes for the new Trump administration as it tries to end wars in Europe and the Middle East and, more broadly, to reverse the ominous path toward the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons that has been accelerated by these conflicts.

Vladimir Putin became more aggressive in Ukraine last year, engineering the collapse of the nuclear guardrails built over seven decades between the U.S. and Russia and lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. He announced that Russian nuclear forces were on full combat alert and soon followed with military exercises to test the readiness of Russia’s non-strategic nuclear forces in a combat scenario.

Putin capped the year by launching Russia’s new hypersonic ballistic missile against targets in Ukraine, while formally announcing a revised Russian nuclear doctrine that officially lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons to meet a conventional threat to Russian territory. The revised doctrine also states that an attack against Russia by a non-nuclear power with the participation or support of a nuclear power will be seen as their........

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