Humanity has lived with nuclear weapons for so long — 80 years, this year — without destroying itself, that we sometimes take them for granted. But there’s no guarantee that our run of luck will continue. In fact, the risks are growing and transforming.

The recent round of fighting between India and Pakistan, the most serious violence between the two nuclear rivals in decades, is a reminder that the risks of nuclear escalation have not disappeared. But that doesn’t mean the risks are exactly the same as they used to be.

The “nuclear age,” can be divided into three parts: The first, from the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 until the end of the Cold War, was characterized by arms build-ups and the ever-present threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. The second, a roughly 30-year period after the end of the Cold War, was marked by arms control agreements, a reduction in the threat of nuclear war, and new concerns like nuclear terrorism and proliferation to rogue regimes like North Korea.

The third age is just beginning. In his new book, The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon, leading nuclear security analyst Ankit Panda introduces readers to a new era that began in roughly the mid-2020s. This new era is characterized by renewed tensions between the world’s superpowers, the emergence of China as a third major nuclear power, the collapse of Cold War-era arms control treaties, and new and potentially destabilizing technological developments like cyberwar and artificial intelligence. The war in Ukraine, the largest conventional war in decades and one that nuclear threats have loomed over from the start, was the most vivid illustration yet of the dynamics of this new era.

In an interview with Vox, Panda, the Stanton senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a widely cited authority on all things nuclear, discussed the dynamics of our new nuclear world and how Donald Trump’s return to the White House could raise nuclear risks.

When nuclear weapons first appeared, leaders and experts expected that their use would just become routine. They’d be just another tool in the arsenal. That, thankfully, hasn’t happened.

So is there a case to be made that deterrence, the idea that countries will avoid using weapons because of the risks of retaliation, just works? Are leaders too afraid of the dangers of these weapons to actually use them, and maybe the risks of nuclear war aren’t as high as we might think?

I wouldn’t go that far. The presence of nuclear weapons does induce a degree of caution in national leaders, militaries, and policymakers in general. But I consider myself something of a deterrence pessimist in that I believe deterrence is real, that it has the effects that its practitioners seek, but I’m not assured that deterrence itself can be rendered perfectly safe because rendering deterrence perfectly safe is something of an oxymoron.

Deterrence is about the manipulation of useful risk. We endlessly debate what level of risk we should be willing to tolerate when it comes to the practice of nuclear deterrence, but we know from the Cold War that there have been instances of organizational failure and human miscalculation that easily could have led to the use of nuclear weapons.

Ultimately, nuclear weapons are a human invention. Nuclear deterrence is an enterprise that requires the involvement of fallible, human organizations.

Longer term, making sure that we keep nuclear weapons unused is going to require a lot more active tending of this incredibly complex enterprise that’s growing a lot more complicated by the day.

This past month, we saw a real-world demonstration of some of the dynamics you write about in the book, in the brief but very intense conflict between India and Pakistan, two nuclear rivals. What do you think that incident tells us about how crises like this are likely to play out in this new nuclear age?

I think we can describe what we saw last week between India and Pakistan as the first South Asian nuclear crisis of this third nuclear range. Both countries have tried to rewrite the rules of their mutual coexistence under the nuclear shadow. [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi’s government has for years been interested in calling Pakistan’s “nuclear bluff.” It wanted to find ways to inflict punishment on the Pakistanis with military force for........

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