Math models show the path towards nuclear war was the only real option from the start
That doesn’t mean it will happen
Recently, Max Tegmark promoted a mathematical model on twitter claiming to have deduced the probability of nuclear war at 1 in 6 or about 17%. Tegmark is no stranger to making claims with dubious logic. This is no exception and several experts weighed in on his lack of scientific rigor and omissions from his simple model. I can’t really blame Tegmark for trying this. As a fellow mathematician, everything looks like a math problem to us, but making a model is one thing, announcing numbers without data to back up your priors is another.
Back at the start of the war, I advocated for a path of brinksmanship with Russia. I argued that NATO should not try to avoid nuclear war at all costs. To do so would be to give up on Ukraine at the outset out of fear. Rather, our goal had to be to escalate the conflict in the face of Russian aggression to the point where we call Russia’s bluff on nukes.
Now we are here. While it may seem that we are in a bad place right now, we are actually in exactly the place we needed to be. Policy makers within NATO and the US military saw the situation the same way I did. We could not allow Russia to intimidate us into giving up on Ukraine.
