Rogers, Paul. "A century on the edge: From Cold War to hot world, 1945-2045". International Affairs, Vol.90, No.1 (2014): 93-106.

Rogers, Paul. "A century on the edge: From Cold War to hot world, 1945-2045". International Affairs, Vol.90, No.1 (2014): 93-106.

• The century between 1945 and 2045 may provide decisive for the future of humanity because during it will are being tested on our ability to deal with two radical threats to human civilization: nuclear weapons, the dominant problem from 1945 into the early 2000s; and anthropogenic climate change, the dominant problem from the 1970s onward (93).
• Humanity has thus far been pretty good about not killing itself using nuclear weapons, although this was often due more to luck than planning, but is dealing poorly with climate change (93).
• The last 250 years of human progress have been extremely rapid compared to previous historical periods. Tool-making humans developed several million years ago and, as recently as 13000 BCE, the global human population was as low as 5 million hunter-gatherers. The first period of revolutionary change was the agricultural revolution, which saw fixed human settlements and a population explosion. The second period of revolutionary change was the industrial revolution, circa late 1700s, which facilitated greater urbanization and population growth, as well as the development of radical new technologies, including nuclear weapons, with massive impacts on the environment (93-94).
• Efforts to curtailed nuclear development following the Manhattan Project failed and by 1955, the USA and USSR had, in total, over 3,000 nuclear warheads. This number increased throughout the Cold War, peaking at 62,000 warheads in 1985 (94).
• Strategic nuclear arms races focused reducing the vulnerability of weapons system by developing the nuclear triad of ICBMs, long-range nuclear bombers, and submarine-based missiles. The initial focus of the arms race was on increasing tonnage, but the focus later shifted to larger arsenals of smaller warheads (94).
• The potential for nuclear escalation increased with the development of tactical and theater-level nuclear weapons and their emplacement within NATO and Warsaw Pact forces, as well as substantial emplacement of chemical weapons. The ability to tactically use nuclear and chemical weapons was often given to relatively low-level commanders (94-95).
• NATO officially adopted a first-strike nuclear policy in 1967, which it maintains to this day. The USSR officially oppose a nuclear first-strike, but there are strong reasons to doubt this assessment based on Soviet actions (94-95).
• Contrary to many assumptions, nuclear deterrence also failed numerous times, on both the American and Soviet sides. New revelations from Soviet archives and officials reveal how close the world came to nuclear conflict in the Cuban Missile Crisis and during Able Archer in 1982. In both cases, crisis almost erupted because the Americans and Soviets were largely ignorant of the other's intentions (95-96).
• Moreover, there was significant conflict through proxy wars between the USA and USSR during the Cold War. This includes 70,000 deaths in Nicaragua and El Salvador, 390,000 deaths in Angola, over 600,000 in the Horn of Africa, over 1 million in Mozambique, 1.3 million in Afghanistan, 2.3 million in Vietnam, and 3 million in the Koreas (95).
• The Cold War was a period of massive military spending that reduced the amount of research focus and funding available to other civilian pursuits, meaning that important humanitarian and technological research was not undertaken due to the Cold War. The Cold War is thus responsible for constraining and retarding human progress during the 20th Century (96).
• Mass participation in developing, testing, and deploying nuclear weapons was rationalized at the lower levels of the nuclear bureaucracy as being a necessary and patriotic duty given that the Soviet Union was engaged in the same projects. At the level of senior military leaders and politicians, the focus was on ideological conflict between the USSR and USA, as well as the negative electoral effects of appearing weak for politicians (97). 
• The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s greatly reduced the danger of nuclear war and nuclear stockpiles have decreased since that time, although little to no progress has been made toward nuclear abolition. Proliferation still poses an issue, as all nuclear powers except China continue to enhance their nuclear arsenals, and nuclear weapons have been developed by Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea, with Iran potentially developing them soon (97).
• The US military after 1991 has refocused its priorities aware from superpower nuclear competition and towards preventing proliferation, abandoning certain capabilities but maintaining a strong nuclear arsenal and continuing to invest in a strong armed forces capable of projecting American power abroad (98).
• The international community also seems poorly prepared for new threats posed by genetic modification and newly virulent biological weapons. Awareness of the danger has, thus far, not led states to significantly improve the inspection and verification procedures of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (97-98).
• The Bush Jr. administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, articulated a new vision of American power in the 21st Century, focused on using American military might to unilaterally support global democracy and free market capitalism. This was demonstrated during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which were easily won by US forces and were expected to created strong capitalist democracies and American allies in strategic regions of the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as improving the US position versus Iran (98-99).
• The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq did not turn out this way, instead becoming protracted conflicts that required troop deployments in excess of 100,000, and have [as of 2014] killed 200,000, displaced over 8 million, and cost over $3 trillion to the USA (99). Public support for continuing the war in Afghanistan has also plummeted, leading to a partial withdrawal in 2014 and a general recognition that the Taliban will continue to govern parts of Afghanistan (100).
• The initial goal of the war, to destroy Al Qaeda, has also been a failure, as the organization survives and has been able to organize and carry out numerous terrorist attacks across the globe since 2001 (99-100).
• The failure of large-scale troop deployments in Afghanistan to win the war and the increasingly casualty-averse public sentiment in the USA and its allies, particularly Britain, has driven the development of low-profile 'remote control' warfare. This has most obviously occurred through drone bombings, but also through an increased reliance on small special operations teams -- which have grown in size from 42,743 personnel in 2008 to an estimated 71,000 in 2015 -- private security contractors, the development of the Prompt Global Strike program capable of intercontinental conventional missile delivery, and the increased use of kidnapping of high-profile targets for delivery to foreign prisons (100-101).
• The use of drone warfare may lead to unintended consequences as American norms of its usage spread. In the future, other major powers, such as Russia or China, may conduct drone strikes as a form of assassination in countries in their own spheres of influence (101).
• The environmental impacts of the industrial revolution were fairly limited up to the 1970s, but, as revealed in reports like 'Limits to Growth', the next 60 years after the 1970s would bring major environmental changes that could endanger the ability of the planet to support its human population (102).
• These environmentalist findings were initially dismissed, particularly as the world liberalized markets during the 1980s under the Washington Consensus. The first time these environmental concerns were taken seriously was the late 1980s, when the destruction of the ozone layer by the increased presence of Chlorofluorocarbons [CFCs] in the atmosphere due to human activity resulted in their prohibition under the 1987 Montreal Convention (102).
• Governments have taken little to no action on curbing the rise of greenhouse has emissions, despite scientific consensus on the threat posed to global carrying capacity from climate change. Some governments, particularly the USA under the Bush Jr. presidency, even denied the existence of anthropogenic global warming (102).
• The combination of rising global inequality and climate change could result in substantial social and political unrest in coming decades, including massive population migrations. The currency global political consensus is good at maintaining order during that system, using police force to quell domestic unrest, inciting nativist and xenophobic sentiment against migration, and deploying military force to support failing governments or topple hostile ones (104).
• It is easier to respond to climate change than to nuclear war because we can see climate change coming incrementally, but it is more difficult to rally support to solve the issue because it is not sudden or dramatic (105).
• There was been a massive increase in global wealth inequality over the past several decades since the deregulation of finance in the 1980s, as the fruits of economic growth since that time have concentrated in the hands of a small group of people, albeit an elite constituting hundreds of millions and spread across different countries. This divide continues to exist and even supports the global economic structure through allowing low wage production (102-103).
• Despite the increase in wealth inequality, there has also been a substantial reduction in poverty and increases in literacy and education since the 1970s (103).
• The policies that need to be implemented to limit the effects of climate change also require substantial adjustments to the global economy in favor of the poor and against the interests of the rich. This means that there is a strong incentive among economic elites to avoid or delay the implementation of these environmentalist economic policies (104).