The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

On July 16, 1945, under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Army detonated a device code-named Trinity in the New Mexico desert. Weeks later a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, dropped a device code-named Little Boy containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people. In an instant, the world had changed. Yet from there, against the wider pattern of history, nuclear weapons did not endlessly proliferate. Nuclear weapons have been detonated only twice in wartime. To date only nine countries have acquired them. Indeed, South Africa relinquished the technology altogether in 1989. As far as we know, no non-state actors have acquired nuclear weapons, and today the total number of warheads stands at around ten thousand, frighteningly large, but lower than Cold War highs, when that figure hovered at more than sixty thousand. So what happened? Nuclear weapons clearly confer a significant strategic advantage. At the end of World War II many unsurprisingly assumed they would proliferate widely. After the successful development of early nuclear bombs, the United States and Russia had been on a path of developing ever more destructive weapons, like thermonuclear hydrogen bombs. The biggest explosion ever recorded was a test of an H-bomb called the Tsar Bomba. Detonated over a remote archipelago in the Barents Sea in 1961, the explosion created a three-mile fireball and a mushroom cloud fifty-nine miles wide. The blast w...

The Exception That Held: Nuclear Nonproliferation’s Uneasy Success