In the Age of AI, Will Machines Start a Nuke War?
In May of last year, China rejected American proposals to limit the use of artificial intelligence for controlling the launch of nuclear weapons.
President Joe Biden raised this issue with Xi Jinping in California the preceding November and announced that AI was one of the areas where the two countries would hold further discussions. Beijing’s quick and adamant rejection of the American initiative, which occurred during talks in Geneva, was a signal that China’s regime had put itself on an exceedingly dangerous course.
“Our position has been publicly clear for a very long time: We don’t think that autonomous systems should be getting near any decision to launch a nuclear weapon,” Tarun Chhabra, then director of technology at the National Security Council, declared. “That’s long-stated U.S. policy.”
“We think all countries around the world should sign up to that,” he also said. “We think that makes a lot of sense to do.”[1]
Yes, it makes sense for countries to keep humans in the decision-making chain when it comes to launching the world’s most destructive weapons and thereby possibly ending humanity. Yet it may be too much to expect humans to not take advantage of the latest technologies. “We are heading to a world where algorithms, without human intervention, will make life-or-death decisions at the speed of electrons,” Blaine Holt, a retired U.S. Air Force general who served as U.S. deputy military representative to NATO, told me in November.[2]
“Nobody wants to see AI-controlled nuclear weapons, right?” asked Joe Wang, a former State Department and NSC staffer at the Arlington, Virginia-based Special Competitive Studies Project, which specializes in AI and emerging technologies. “Like, even the craziest dictator can probably agree.”[3]
Xi Jinping, who fancies himself a dictator, in fact rejected any agreement on AI with America. “The Chinese Communist Party has advocated nuclear arms control only for other nuclear powers,” Richard Fisher, Jr. of the International Assessment and Strategy Center told me in June of last year. “For China, the CCP seeks nuclear arms superiority.”[4]
“China is taking its nuclear arsenal to the next level by, among other things, marrying nuclear-tipped missiles to powerful artificial intelligence capabilities,” Brandon Weichert, author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, wrote to this author in June of last year.
“AI-controlled nukes would be far more devastating than your ordinary ones,” Weichert, also senior national security editor at the National Interest, stated. “The Chinese are behaving foolishly, though, because the chance for unintended consequences is high. Frankly, AI could easily lead to a nightmare scenario where China loses control of its nuclear weapons arsenal to a rabid artificial intelligence system.”[5]
Hollywood loves rabid machines triggering Armageddon. There was, for instance, WarGames, the 1983 movie in which an American military computer, on its own, simulated an all-out Soviet attack and almost launched a U.S. counterstrike. In the Terminator franchise, a super AI network known as Skynet detonates nuclear weapons that darkens the sky and eliminates most of humankind.
No one should want to give machines the power to decide whether to end the world or not.
The world almost ended in the early hours of September 26, 1983. Then, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at the Serpukhov-15 early-warning center south of Moscow. Successive alarms indicated that America had launched five Minuteman missiles from Montana toward the Soviet Union. More than thirty reliability checks in Serpukhov-15 confirmed the attack. Procedures required Petrov to authorize a retaliatory launch.
The Soviet officer, however, ignored procedure. “A feeling inside told me something was wrong.”
Petrov’s “feeling” was right: Sensors aboard satellite Kosmos 1382 misinterpreted sunlight bouncing off the tops of clouds as incoming American missiles.
His instinct—what Petrov later called “a funny feeling in my gut”—led him to save the world.[6] Maybe one day a machine will be able to form and follow “gut” instincts, but artificial intelligence has not progressed that far now.
Now, AI systems, still in their infancy, are particularly dependent on information they receive, such as sunlight bouncing off the tops of clouds. “Relying upon an incredibly rapid accumulation of information doesn’t say anything about the validity of what you’re collecting,” Peter Huessy of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies told me recently. “Rapidly collecting bad information doesn’t make it good. And given that false information may trigger impulsive, dangerous military action or diplomatic inaction, every smart move must be made to properly assess all data.”[7]
Those smart moves must be made by humans. Although human decision-making can be flawed—A House of Dynamitedramatizes the human frailties in launch decisions—machine decisions would be far worse. An AI-controlled system in Petrov’s situation would almost certainly have launched a first strike on America, which would have been followed by an American retaliatory launch. Which would have been followed by additional Soviet attacks. Machines, making mistakes at frightening speeds, would have killed off most of humanity and poisoned the planet for centuries.
Has humanity learned anything from the events of September 26, 1983? Russia, with its “Dead Hand” or “Perimeter” system, already has put nuclear weapons under autonomous control. China’s refusal to even discuss a ban on artificial intelligence in these circumstances suggests it too will employ AI for this purpose.
As Fisher, a China military analyst, points out, there is a “new nuclear arms race with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.”[8] The race will involve not only numbers of warheads, as it did in the Cold War, but also the automation of launch decisions.
The Chinese appear to believe that AI makes their nuke arsenal more fearsome, and they are correct. For instance, decapitation strikes by adversaries would no longer make sense because the killing of China’s national leaders would lead to an automatic Chinese nuclear strike. Moreover, China, which routinely has made threats to launch nuclear weapons first, could use AI to improve those initial attacks.
There is, unfortunately, not just an arms race at the moment. China is preparing for war with the United States. “This war will involve strategic surprise,” Weichert points out. “AI will help China determine when best to strike, where to strike, and what weapons to strike with, perhaps nukes.”[9]
Trigger-happy machines are going to become an even bigger problem soon. “Just imagine what can happen when you take the fierce hatred and sometimes warlike conduct between India and Pakistan and then add an AI threat-detection system, such as Palantir’s Gotham, which assesses intent ahead of actions,” Holt, the retired Air Force general, told me. “Do we look with horror at nuclear exchanges that no human directed?”[10]
The AI issues are being resolved as the world becomes less stable. “It’s time to review some history,” Holt reminds us. “The Soviet Union melted down, and we were lucky then. But what happens the next time when a nuclear-armed ruling group splits and their regime collapses?”[11] Of particular concern are the series of purges of senior officers in China’s Rocket Force, which controls the country’s nuclear weapons, and the turmoil within the Chinese military in general this decade.[12] Says Holt, “China’s Communist Party at the moment looks particularly shaky.”[13]
Something else is also shaky: the world’s arms-control architecture. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty counts 191 signatories—almost all the countries in the world— but is ailing despite its almost universal adoption for various reasons.
First, the international community has not stopped rogue states from developing nukes. North Korea, for instance, built an atomic device and then withdrew from the treaty. Iran, employing Pyongyang’s playbook, is obviously violating the pact’s terms by building such devices. The “Operation Midnight Hammer” strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites in June by American B-2 bombers may have set back Tehran’s program, but Iran has not given up ambitions to become the 10th member of what is called the “nuclear club.”
Second, other countries are thinking of withdrawing from the NPT, as the global non-proliferation treaty is known. Among other reasons, signatories feel they can no longer depend on the United States to protect them with its “nuclear umbrella.” They see, for instance, the hesitant reaction of Washington and other Western capitals to Vladimir Putin’s repeated threats to use nukes if they came to the aid of Ukraine. China, despite its publicly declared no-first-use policy, has routinely threatened the first use of nuclear weapons against, most notably, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. North Korea from time to time has said it would launch nuclear-tipped missiles.[14]
Third, the last major remaining bilateral nuclear arms-control agreement, commonly known as “New START,” is scheduled to expire in February. Even if Washington and Moscow were to extend the pact—by its terms it is not renewable—or replace it, the agreement would be inadequate to restore strategic stability because China has consistently refused to engage in arms-control discussions.
Leaving China outside an arms-control agreement would be foolish because the country is fast increasing its arsenal of nuclear warheads. Famed American analyst James Howe predicts China will have between 3,390 to 3,740 nuclear weapons by 2035.[15] That would be more than twice the number of nukes—1,550—the U.S. is generally permitted to deploy under New START.
Fourth, countries, after a decades-long hiatus, are about to break a taboo and openly resume testing nuclear weapons with fissile material. President Donald Trump, in late October, declared on Truth Social that the United States would begin detonating nukes. “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” he wrote. “That process will begin immediately.”[16] The United States has not conducted a nuclear weapons test with fissile material—plutonium or uranium—since 1992. America has signed but not ratified the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which prohibits all tests involving detonations of fissile material.
Trump is trying to catch up with, among others, China, which also has signed but not ratified the test-ban treaty. The Chinese military has almost certainly been conducting secret detonations of fissile material. “Commercial surveillance satellites between 2020 and 2024 observed China dramatically expanding its nuclear weapons testing site at Lop Nur, to include the apparent drilling of new tunnels for the testing of nuclear devices underground,” Richard Fisher told me in November. “In addition to preparing to resume underground nuclear testing, it is also very likely that China has proceeded with ‘sub critical’ nuclear testing and the testing of components of nuclear weapons that included fissile material that produced very low-yield explosions.”[17]
Fisher is not the only analyst who thinks the Chinese have been setting off nuclear devices. Huessy believes both Russia and China have been conducting tests with fissile material over the course of decades.[18]
Mark Schneider, a senior analyst at the National Institute for Public Policy, in a paper published in September, wrote that both the Trump and Biden administrations had determined that “Russia was conducting yield-producing nuclear tests” and “raised concerns that China also was conducting nuclear tests.”[19] Russia rescinded its ratification of the test-ban treaty in November 2023.
The U.S. intelligence community concurs. “After consultations with Director Ratcliffe and his team, they have confirmed to me that the CIA assesses that both Russia and China have conducted super-critical nuclear weapons tests in excess of the U.S. zero-yield standard,” Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, stated in comments posted on X on November 3.[20]
There have been only two detonations of nuclear weapons in anger, both in August 1945. Those horrific explosions—over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—helped end a horrific war, but will the next detonations begin a third global conflict?
“We are at a moment where we are losing the last generation of the people who actually understand how terrible nuclear war actually is,” said Garrett Graff, author of The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, to the Washington Post.
“We stand much closer to a nuclear precipice than most of us realize,” Graff warns.[21]
That grim assessment is, most unfortunately, correct. There is now an almost irresistible momentum to war, with China and Russia either directly or indirectly waging conflicts this year across three continents, and if they begin using artificial intelligence to make launch decisions, disaster awaits.
“We are on notice, but we have not yet noticed,” Weichert states. “AI could be the technology that China uses to take the U.S. by surprise and defeat America’s military in combat.”[22]
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.
[1] Bill Gertz, “White House Says Beijing Rejects Call to Restrict AI Use in Nuclear Weapons Use,” Washington Times, June 24, 2024, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jun/24/white-house-says-beijing-rejects-call-to-restrict-/.
[2] Blaine Holt, telephone conference with author, November 25, 2025.
[3] Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., “Biden Launches AI ‘Risk and Safety’ Talks With China. Is Nuclear C2 a Likely Focus?” Breaking Defense, November 15, 2023, https://breakingdefense.com/2023/11/biden-launches-ai-risk-and-safety-talks-with-china-is-nuclear-c2-a-likely-focus/.
[4] Rick Fisher, e-mail message to author, June 25, 2024.
[5] Brandon J. Weichert, e-mail message to author, June 24, 2024.
[6] Tom Parfitt, “No Hollywood Ending for the Man Who Saved the World,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), July 24, 2004, https://www.scmp.com/article/464055/no-hollywood-ending-man-who-saved-world; David Hoffman, “‘I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut,’” Washington Post, February 10, 1999, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/shatter021099b.htm. “Red Army Man Who Kept Calm and Saved the World,” Daily Mail (London), September 24, 1998 p. 14.
[7] Peter Huessy, text message to author, November 10, 2025.
[8] Rick Fisher, e-mail message to author, June 25, 2024.
[9] Brandon J. Weichert, e-mail message to author, June 24, 2024.
[10] Blaine Holt, text message to author, November 25, 2025.
[11] Blaine Holt, telephone conference with author, November 25, 2025.
[12] Gordon G. Chang, “Despite Military Purges, China’s Next War ‘Could Be Imminent’ and Spread Fast,” Hill, June 9, 2025, https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5337657-china-turmoil-war-threat/.
[13] Blaine Holt, telephone conference with author, November 25, 2025.
[14] Gordon G. Chang, “China and the Age of Nuclear Coercion,” Pacific Research Institute, July 2024,https://www.pacificresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ChangReport_N1_F.pdf.
[15] Mark B. Schneider, “China’s Nuclear Weapons Buildup Is a Strategic Breakout,” National Interest, December 7, 2023, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-nuclear-weapons-buildup-strategic-breakout-207774/.
[16] @realDonaldTrump, TruthSocial.com, October 29, 2025 at 9:04 PM,https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115460423936412555.
[17] Rick Fisher, e-mail message to author, November 3, 2025.
[18] Peter Huessy, e-mail message to author, November 1, 2025.
[19] Mark B. Schneider, “The Case for Resumed Nuclear Testing,” National Institute for Public Policy, September 2025, https://nipp.org/papers/the-case-for-resumed-nuclear-testing/.
[20] @SenTomCotton, X.com, November 3, 2025 at 6:51 PM,https://x.com/SenTomCotton/status/1985494966693470214.
[21] Anne Branigin, “‘A House of Dynamite’ Gets a Lot Right. Experts Hope That Terrifies You,” Washington Post, November 1, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2025/11/01/house-dynamite-bigelow-nuclear-war-experts/.
[22] Brandon J. Weichert, e-mail message to author, November 22, 2025.
