For a long time, nuclear weapons were viewed as a deterrent. Their power lay not only in instant destruction and mass death, but also in long-term consequences—radiation, disease, and environmental degradation. Nuclear war meant not the victory of one side, but the potential end of civilization.

It is often believed that this mechanism worked as long as nuclear weapons remained in the hands of “rational elites.” But this is a convenient illusion. The danger of nuclear weapons has never been rooted in the personal qualities of leaders, but in the decision-making systems themselves: limited time, incomplete information, errors, malfunctions, and the human factor. The world has come close to catastrophe more than once not because of madness, but because of ordinary systemic failures.

Today the risk is not diminishing—it is changing shape. Nuclear weapons may end up in the hands of regimes for which consequences are not a deterrent. But even beyond this, the problem runs deeper: the more complex and tightly interconnected global systems become, the higher the cost of any mistake.

The need for nuclear weapons is often justified by fear of external conquest. In Russian discourse, this is the fear of the “collective West,” allegedly seeking to seize territory—by analogy with 1612, 1812, and 1941. Historically, such fears are understandable, but under modern conditions they look unrealistic. A large-scale conquest of Russia is, first, practically impossible. Second, even hypothetically it would require colossal human, financial, and political costs that Western societies are neither willing nor able to bear. The losses would be wildly disproportionate to any conceivable gains.

An even simpler question arises: why? Everything valuable that Russia supplies to the world—oil, gas, raw materials—has long been accessible without military conquest, through trade and economic mechanisms, at a cost incomparably lower than the price of war and subsequent governance of occupied territory.

If this argument is extended to the global scale, it becomes clear that the very logic of wars for territory is largely obsolete. In the past, land directly meant wealth: agriculture, taxes, labor. Today, the main value is created by technologies, knowledge, infrastructure, financial flows, and human capital—things that are poorly captured by force and even harder to retain through occupation.

The example of regions such as Alsace and Lorraine is telling. Once they were fought over fiercely, and this made economic and strategic sense. Today these territories have ceased to be objects of military rivalry not because history disappeared, but because the economic rationale for war over them vanished.

Another factor adds to this: the scale of destruction. Modern warfare inevitably destroys infrastructure—roads, energy networks, industry, housing, logistics, communications. Even a formal “victory” leaves behind a territory requiring enormous investment for reconstruction. These costs can be calculated in advance. And if a war can be calculated in advance as unprofitable for decades to come, a simple question arises: why start it?

In this context, more and more modern wars look like attempts to solve 21st-century problems with tools from the past. They occur not because they bring benefit, but for reasons of a different order—fear, status, identity, internal legitimization of power.

And this is where nuclear weapons become especially dangerous. They protect not real interests of the future, but images of a world that has long ceased to exist. As long as humanity has not learned to abandon instruments of absolute force, the risk will not decrease but accumulate—regardless of technology, leaders, or eras.

Nuclear weapons are needed by states not for conquest and not for economic gain. They are needed as an instrument of absolute deterrence—as a last argument guaranteeing that an adversary will not risk delivering a fatal strike. In this sense, nuclear weapons are not weapons of war, but weapons of fear embedded in a system of mutual distrust.

So is it possible to live without nuclear weapons?

Theoretically—yes. Practically—not yet.

The world has long outgrown wars for land and economic conquest, but it has not outgrown fear, status rivalry, and the struggle for control. As long as states think in terms of existential threat, nuclear weapons remain insurance against the worst-case scenario—even if they themselves bring that scenario closer.

This is the paradox of nuclear weapons: they simultaneously
• reduce the probability of a major war,
• and make its consequences final.

Humanity will be able to live without nuclear weapons only when it learns to live without the logic of total mutual destruction. Until then, nuclear weapons remain not a solution, but a symptom—dangerous, outdated, and still functioning.

Sometimes the idea is voiced that in the future control over the use of nuclear weapons could be handed over to artificial intelligence. It is assumed that a more developed, rational, and self-aware mind would see the senselessness of mutual destruction and prevent it.

Theoretically, this is possible. But intelligence—or even consciousness—by itself does not guarantee a humane outcome. A more advanced mind does not necessarily think in human moral categories. It is more likely to think in terms of system stability, preservation of complexity, and risk minimization over long time horizons.

Such a mind may conclude that the total destruction of life on the planet is irrational—not out of compassion, but because it destroys the system of which it is a part. But this does not at all mean that humans would automatically become the highest value. Humanity could be perceived as a source of instability requiring strict limitation—just as humans today restrict animals or dangerous ecosystem processes.

In this sense, even a hypothetical “conscious AI” does not solve the problem of nuclear weapons; it merely shifts it to another level. The issue is not a choice between human and machine, but between the logic of destruction and the logic of managing a complex system.

And here the most uncomfortable conclusion emerges:
nuclear weapons exist not because we are insufficiently intelligent, but because we have not learned how to live in a world where we possess absolute power. Transferring this power to a more advanced intelligence does not eliminate the question—it merely changes who decides what is acceptable.

Perhaps the main question is not whether AI can prevent nuclear war, but whether humanity is ready to admit that it itself has not yet coped with this task.

The only theoretically radical way out of this dead end would be abandoning a world built around sovereign states and territorial borders. In a world where power belongs to global distributed structures, nuclear weapons lose their practical meaning: such systems have no capital, no territory, and no single center whose destruction would mean victory. A missile requires an address—and a global structure has none. Any nuclear strike in such a world inevitably becomes a strike against one’s own environment of existence.

As production becomes increasingly robotized, humans lose their status as an economically necessary element of the system. And when production, logistics, and even governance operate without mass human participation, the population ceases to be a source of the tax base and becomes an object of redistribution.

In such a configuration, the state no longer depends economically on its citizens. The dependency reverses: citizens depend on access to resources, which is controlled not through electoral mechanisms, but through infrastructure and distributed access systems.

This undermines the foundation of the nation-state:
the masses cease to be a lever, because they are no longer an economic necessity.

And when the state loses its economic support in the form of the mass taxpayer, real power shifts to where control over flows remains:
• automated production;
• logistics and supply chains;
• financial and payment systems;
• data, clouds, standards, platforms.

Large companies that produce and control these “goods” begin to exert increasing influence on governments—not through formal seizure of power, but because economic functioning passes through them.

Yes, in any group there are governance functions: resource distribution, decision-making, sanctions. But this does not imply the existence of a single center.

In the modern world, the center is increasingly transformed from a place into a protocol: decisions are made not “in the capital,” but within distributed financial, logistical, informational, and standardization systems. This is not anarchy, but governance through infrastructure.

Already today many key decisions occur above electoral politics:
• access to payments, credit, insurance, clouds, markets, and platforms;
• standards and compliance;
• algorithmic ratings, risk scoring, moderation, automatic sanctions.

These mechanisms do not require a single ruler.
They require a network of operators and rules, where power is distributed among nodes.

Thus, a “world without a center” is possible in a literal sense:
• there is no single capital that can be “taken”;
• there is no single command post that can be destroyed;
• governance is distributed across many nodes, each controlling its own lever.

The analogy is obvious: the Internet operates without a single center, yet it is not chaos—it has protocols, routing, control points, DNS, and standards.

Power can function the same way: as a network of mutual dependencies and automated rules.

This is a matter of political “address entropy”: power loses a single address while retaining governance as a function.

States do not “collapse” instantly.
They lose meaning as a central node because they:
• are no longer economically necessary intermediaries between people and production;
• cease to be the main channel of decision-making;
• remain a shell of legitimacy in a system where real governance has moved into infrastructure.