'Heed our warnings': Nobel laureates plea for diplomacy to prevent nuclear war

Source: USA Today

Updated July 20, 2025, 1:06 p.m. ET


CHICAGO - In the fall of 2022, U.S. spies said the chances of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine were 50% - a coin flip. Nearly three years later, the risk of nuclear war has only increased, top experts say. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' famed "Doomsday Clock" is the closest it has ever been to midnight.

Humanity is “heading in the wrong direction” on the one threat that “could end civilization in an afternoon,” warned an assembly of Nobel laureates, nuclear experts, and diplomats gathered at the University of Chicago to mark the 80th anniversary of the planet’s first nuclear explosion in 1945 when the United States conducted the Trinity test in New Mexico.

Although Russia didn’t nuke its neighbor, the brutal war of attrition continues in Ukraine. Two nuclear-armed countries, India and Pakistan, attacked each other in May. The United States and Israel, which both have nuclear weapons, bombed Iran in June to destroy its nuclear program. Popular support for building nuclear weapons grows in countries like Japan and South Korea.

Against this backdrop, more than a dozen Nobel Prize winners and numerous nuclear experts signed a “Declaration for the Prevention of Nuclear War” on July 16 with recommendations for world leaders to reduce the increasing risk of nuclear conflict.

Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/20/nobel-winners-call-on-world-leaders-nuclear-war/85262279007/