It is a paradox that few aspects of international security have been as closely scrutinized, but as incorrectly forecast, as the future nuclear landscape. Since the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, there have been dozens, if not hundreds of projections by government and independent analysts trying to predict horizontal and vertical proliferation across the world. Various studies examined which countries would acquire nuclear weapons, when this would happen, how many weapons the two superpowers as well as other countries would assemble, and the impact these developments might have on world peace. The results have oscillated between gross underestimations and terrifying overestimations. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the fear that nuclear weapons might be acquired by so-called “rogues states” or terrorist groups brought added urgency – and increased difficulty – to the task of accurately assessing the future of nuclear weapons.

A survey of past public and private projections provides a timely reminder of the flaws in both the methodologies and theories they employed. Many of these errors were subsequently corrected, but not before, they made lasting impressions on U.S. nuclear (and non-nuclear) policies. This was evident from the time the ‘Atoms for Peace’ program was first promulgated in 1953 to the 1970 establishment of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and more recently during the post-Cold War disarmament efforts and debates surrounding U.S. stance towards emerging nuclear threats.

This study offers a brief survey of attempts to predict the future of nuclear weapons since the beginning of the Cold War.1 The aim of this analysis is not merely to review the record, but to provide an overall sense of how the nuclear future was perceived over the past six decades, and where and why errors were made in prediction, so that contemporary and future predictive efforts have the benefit of a clearer historical record. The survey is based on U.S. intelligence estimates as well as the voluminous scholarly work of American and foreign experts on the subject.

Read the complete analysis (PDF, 86 pages, 542 KB)