How Deepfakes Could Lead to Doomsday Erin D. Dumbacher December 29, 2025 Nuclear missiles at a military parade in Beijing, September 2025 Tingshu Wang / Reuters Since the dawn of the nuclear age, policymakers and strategists have tried to prevent a country from deploying nuclear weapons by mistake. But the potential for accidents remains as high as it was during the Cold War. In 1983, a Soviet early warning system erroneously indicated that a U.S. nuclear strike on the Soviet Union was underway; such a warning could have triggered a catastrophic Soviet counterattack. The fate was avoided only because the on-duty supervisor, Stanislav Petrov, determined that the alarm was false. Had he not, Soviet leadership would have had reason to fire the world’s most destructive weapons at the United States. The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence has exacerbated threats to nuclear stability. One fear is that a nuclear weapons state might delegate the decision to use nuc...
