OpinionDavid Wallace-Wells

Do We Really Need to Wager on the Chances of Nuclear Armageddon?

By David Wallace-Wells

ALTsLast month, as American forces gathered in the Middle East in obvious preparation for an attack on Iran, you could’ve made a small fortune gambling on when exactly the bombing would begin.

One user on the prediction site Polymarket — where you can wager on an increasingly large share of human events, from the trivial to the tragic — made $553,000 on bets placed right before Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed by U.S.-Israeli strikes. Another user was quickly flagged by observers on X as having made $2.14 million in by placing bets on........

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