75 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some experts believe the risk of the use of a nuclear weapon is as high now as it has been since the Cuban missile crisis.

The big picture: Nuclear war remains the single greatest present threat to humanity and one that is poised to grow as emerging technologies, like much faster missiles, cyber warfare and artificial intelligence, upset an already precarious nuclear balance.

What's happening: A mix of shifting geopolitical tensions and technological change is upsetting a decades-long state of strategic stability around nuclear weapons.

Cyber warfare can directly increase the risk of nuclear conflict if it is used to disrupt command and control systems.

AI is only in its infancy, but depending on how it develops, it could utterly disrupt the nuclear balance.

Be smart: As analysts from RAND wrote in a 2018 report, "AI may be strategically destabilizing not because it works too well but because it works just well enough to feed uncertainty." Whether or not an AI system could provide a decisive advantage in a nuclear standoff, if either the system's user or that country's opponent believes it can do so, the result could be catastrophic.

The bottom line: The riskiest period of the Cold War was its earliest stages, when military and political leaders didn't yet fully understand the nature of what Hiroshima had demonstrated. Emerging technologies like AI threaten to plunge us back into that uncertainty.

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How new tech raises the risk of nuclear war - Axios