I am going to try and get back into the swing of things!

So James Fallows has an interesting take on existential threats, basically boiling down to the idea that any nation with sufficient nuclear capability represents an existential nuclear threat to every other nation on the planet, so the only way to get rid of the threat is the "Countdown to Zero," a.k.a. total nuclear disarmament.

Of course, any futurologist/technologist will tell you, that's sort of silly. The nature of knowledge is that once it's out of the bottle, it can't be stuffed back in, and when combined with the increasing ease of access to manufacturing, existential threats are going to start popping up from every group with sufficient resources and a grudge. Fallows makes the point that Iran is a rational actor, which given the nature of states, is true! Thus Iran, as a rational actor, is not going to provoke a war in which both sides lose massively. Sure, fine.

But, for example, take the recent Israel-Lebanon war; or, as NPR called it today, the "Israel-Hezbollah conflict". Now, Lebanon - as a rational state actor - would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons against Israel if it had them, and Israel would in fact be less likely to violate Lebanon's territorial sovereignty. But what if those weapons were in the hands of Hezbollah? Would Hezbollah, as a non-state actor, hesitate to use nuclear weapons for fear of nuclear reprisal? Or would they assume that they would be protected by the shield of the uninvolved civilian population in Lebanon?

I think that this sort of problem is likely to be the future of anti-proliferation efforts. We need to figure out a way of understanding, and where appropriate, changing the nuclear calculus.