When the U.S. chose the targets for its first two atom bombs, the order of choice started with Hiroshima, then Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. Niigata would have been the Hiroshima bomb’s secondary target.

The bombing of Nagasaki, a city with a population of just under 200,000, was a last-minute decision, made during the B-29 bomber’s flight from Tinian, the Pacific island that the American marines captured in the summer of 1944 and turned into a base for bombing operations over Japan’s home islands.

The Nagasaki bomb exploded 500 metres (1,650 feet) above the city and immediately killed an estimated 40,000. By the end of 1945, another 30,000 died from injuries sustained at the time and from radiation poisoning. An additional 4,000 died later from longer-term radiation-associated illnesses.

No atomic bomb has been unleashed on a civilian population since the two August 1945 bombings. Only the Americans possessed this weapon at the end of World War II. Today, however, eight more have joined the nuclear club. Collectively, there are now more than 12,300 nuclear warheads in military arsenals around the world despite a United Nations Non-Proliferation Treaty that came into force in 1970. These warheads are far more potent and lethal than the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Today’s leading nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia and China, are enhancing their nuclear capabilities through modernization programs. The only constraint on the U.S. and Russia is a treaty called New START that will expire next year. Meanwhile, China, the third-largest nuclear power, continues to expand its arsenal.

In 2025, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest measure of concern, suggesting the potential for a future nuclear war. The Clock is a metaphor representing how human-engineered technologies and actions are leading to an extinction-level event. The Clock recognizes that other existential threats could lead to our demise. These include biological weapons, artificial intelligence (AI), and climate change. The Bulletin continues to cite concerns about the ongoing Russian-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza-Iran wars as potential tipping points that could lead to a nuclear war.

Combining nuclear weapons and rapidly advancing AI represents a heightened threat. AI is great at processing vast amounts of data and seeing patterns often missed by humans. As such, an AI fed with bad data could influence political and military decision-makers about threat levels posed by antagonists. An AI that is vulnerable to cyberattacks could provide misinformation fed to it by a perceived enemy. AI-generated disinformation (the AI engines do hallucinate from time to time) could lead to a human ordering a nuclear launch.

The Lessons Learned From World War One

The decision-making steps that led to past world wars should never be forgotten.  The best example of how out-of-control things can get comes from the steps that led to World War One. It began with the assassination of the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian dual monarchy in June 1914.

This bullet, fired by a Bosnian-Serb, sparked a series of calamitous events beginning with Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia, Serbia’s agreement to almost all the demands, and yet not good enough for the Austrians, leading to a declaration of war. Then Russia came to Serbia’s defence. Germany joined to defend Austria-Hungary. Then France and Great Britain joined with Russia, and so on with Italy, Japan and the British Dominions soon following. Three years later, the U.S. entered the war in alignment with France and Great Britain.

Germany’s war plans had baked-in mobilizations with the bulk of the army moving against France, not Russia. France had its mobilization plans. So did Great Britain with the British Expeditionary Force crossing the channel to support France.

This step-by-step descent to madness was a product of each country’s military planners, and voila, the first 20th-century global war began. When the armistice came over four years later, the war dead amounted to over 11 million soldiers and 13 million civilians.

Not only did this “war-to-end-all-wars” not do the trick, with World War Two more a continuation of the first, it also led to an immediate global 20th-century pandemic, the Spanish flu. It spread from soldiers on the battlefield to home countries and then across the globe, with estimated deaths amounting to between 50 and 100 million.

Some Lessons From World War Two Remain Unlearned

The second global 20th-century war spawned many of the technologies we use today. The war led to the development of advanced rocketry, jet aircraft, computers and the atomic bomb.

The latter two, combined in the 21st century, may prove our undoing. Nuclear weapons have been a devastating threat to us and the rest of life on Earth since 1945. AI, the ultimate offspring of modern computing software and hardware, poses an equal existential risk if used in conjunction with nuclear weapons. The nuclear-capable countries are increasingly modernizing and in many cases, expanding their arsenals. The pairing of destructive bombs and advanced AI represents a risk that The Bulletin believes has never been higher.

With AI, faster, more automated command and control systems without human oversight will lead to accelerated decision-making. The pressure on leaders will involve assessing and responding to crises much faster. That means mistakes are likely to happen. What fail-safe strategies will we need to stop the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield?

Russia has been threatening to use nuclear battlefield weapons since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and as the offensive has bogged down. What was first conceived as a quick surgical strike to overthrow Ukraine’s elected government has become the longest European war since World War Two.

Along with the fighting, European Union countries, the U.S. and many other Western democracies have aligned with Ukraine. China and a few other countries are supporting Russia.

Russia’s nuclear blackmail threats may be real or a bluff. The sabre-rattling has produced a response from the Western NATO alliance, with its members sending surplus weapons to Ukraine and upping military spending. They are staying out of the war directly, but are invested in a positive Ukrainian outcome.

Now, we can only hope that no misteps follow with an errant AI or human miscalculation turning the Russia-Ukraine conflict into a war where nuclear weapons get used by one side and then the other in response, aided and abetted by AI.

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I remember a list by James Martin, who wrote “The Meaning of the 21st Century.” Martin was an IT savant and futurist and I was an avid reader of his books and articles. His top concern was global warming. Although he included the threat of pandemics and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) well before these two subjects became part of the daily global conversation, on his list they were lower concerns than population growth, freshwater scarcity and food insecurity, ecosystem collapses particularly in the ocean, and desertification.

The last item on Martin’s list was a fear of the rise of a new Dark Age. The Dark Ages was an expression coined by historians studying the aftermath of the decline and fall of Rome covering a period from the late 5th century to the beginning of the Renaissance from the mid-15th century onward. Martin described his Dark Age as a global cocktail of intolerable poverty, outrageous wealth, starvation, mass terrorism, nuclear and biological weapons, world war, religious insanity and worldwide unending hatred and violence.

Martin never foresaw the rise of the Internet and social media. If he had, I am sure he would have added them to his list because these technologies could influence all the other threats he described.

What is on my list of the greatest threats we face this century? Today I have chosen five to talk about.

1. Climate change and pollution stand at the top. Climate change impacts freshwater and food security. Climate change is causing vector-borne diseases to spread like malaria, Dengue, Chikungunya, diarrheal diseases and more. Climate change causes extreme weather causing droughts to go longer, storms to get stronger, and atmospheric rivers to linger causing flooding. Climate change melts polar and land ice raising sea levels. It is a pretty all-encompassing threat to our present way of living.
2. Growing ignorance and stupidity are my second choice. It appears that we increasingly are picking the wrong people to lead nations. It also appears that humans are getting dumber. A new term is entering our vocabulary: idiocracy. Since the beginning of the 20th century, humanity saw a significant increase in our collective intelligence, that is, until the last quarter of the 20th and the first quarter of the 21st. A Stanford University-published article by Julian Cribb, an Australian science writer, describes the average decline in human intelligence as 3 IQ points per decade and 13.5% in total between the years 1975 and 2020. He notes that a decline of 7 IQ points, “translates the average citizen to the intelligence level of the average juvenile delinquent.” Since 2020, considering the latest results from the U.S. presidential and congressional elections, and the ascendancy of populist leaders in many democracies, intelligence is on the downslide. Internet rabbit holes lead to conspiracy theories. Addiction to small screens has hundreds of millions wasting hours daily watching mind-numbing nonsense. It is no wonder that our brains are becoming toast and why the people we vote for are getting dumber. It is no wonder that anti-vaxxers have a growing following even in the face of a mountain of scientific evidence that is available to the public. The Stanford article blames toxins from chemical pollutants flooding the environment as a reason for the rise in autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression and other mental disorders. The Stanford article claims that 800 million humans today, 10% of the global population, suffer from mental conditions.
3. An ageing population with a lack of a succession strategy could be a civilization killer. I remember speaking to the newly elected head of the Liberal Party of Canada back in 2013 about this very topic but he misunderstood my meaning. He thought I was talking about inheritance. I wasn’t. It was about passing the torch from one generation to the next and the need to achieve successful intergenerational knowledge transfer. An aging experienced workforce is being replaced by a younger generation. A mechanism to pass the knowledge from the former to the latter is what a succession strategy is all about. A succession strategy eases skill shortages and lessens knowledge gaps. It is hard not to notice the tens of thousands of jobs that today lie unfilled. I see the listings every day with employers getting hundreds of applicants with insufficient knowledge capable of meeting the job descriptions. So a growing number of vacancies are being left by retirees. Succession planning ensures effective knowledge transfer. That’s why there is a need for national programs to leverage technology to facilitate intergenerational learning through mentorship and job-sharing. Some companies and organizations have recognized the need and begun succession programs. These include BNL BNP Paribas in Italy, Google, The Mayo Clinic, General Electric, IBM and Novartis. However, the numbers are small and no country has yet to institute a national succession strategy. It is no wonder we are dumbing down.
4. It is hard to ignore present wars and the threat of a nuclear one in our future. Armed conflicts in 2024 reached 59 in total with 92 countries engaged. These include Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel and its Arab neighbours, and religious and civil wars. In 2023, conflicts killed 122,000 with three-quarters of deaths coming from the Russia-Ukraine and Israeli-Arab wars. The estimated economic cost of conflicts in 2023 amounted to $19.1 trillion. As bad as these wars are, a nuclear one would be far worse with devastating consequences of life on the planet. Research by the International Red Cross describes the effects of a limited nuclear war where 100 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs are detonated (a quantity that represents less than 0.5% of the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons). Besides the millions killed from the dropping of the bombs, the outcome would disrupt global climate and food production leading to a billion dying from starvation. Radiation poisoning would cause a rise in cancers leading to more deaths. Without a global plan for providing humanitarian assistance to victims of a nuclear strike or the fallout after the bombs detonate, war using this technology would lead to civilization’s end.
5. Unethical development and use of AI represent a distinct threat to our survival. Within the next two decades, we are likely to see the emergence of a superintelligent AI. Without human oversight including incorporating technology limits, and ethical and organizational strategies, an AI at worst could make decisions leading to mass disruption and even war. A superintelligent AI without guardrails may determine for Earth to best survive, humanity would need to be purged. A superintelligent AI could make it impossible for us to pull the plug. The AI could develop its own ethical construct with values far different than its human creators. Even if the AI is not a superintelligence, using it could be dangerous if improperly applied. For example, an improperly trained AI could be unleashed to solve a problem that produces bad decisions and outcomes. What should happen if an AI develops consciousness as we experience it? There are aspects of human consciousness we would not wish to imbue upon an AI, human traits like malice, hate, envy, revenge, fear and many more. Without the earlier described threat of a lack of succession strategy, AI could replace all who retire and eliminate opportunities for future generations of humanity to succeed turning us into a kept and captive species.

No doubt, as readers of this blog, you may have your own lists of the biggest threats we face. I would welcome hearing what you have concluded and why.

The post The Biggest Threats Humanity Faces This Century appeared first on Techso Mogro.