Russians are so butthurt by the development of increasingly effective missile defense systems that they are developing secret weapons like the Status-6 nuclear torpedo designed to be guided to the coastline by an autonomous stealth drone submarine at 100 knots, and detonated to contaminate coastlines or coastal cities with radiation. It's basically a dirty bomb designed to ensure MAD stays MAD even if the DoD figures out how to consistently shoot down Russian missiles.
Basically given the fact that humanity knows how to use nuclear weapons now, it's only a matter of time until the correct circumstances converge and we use them--whether that's in 100 years or 10,000.
Anyway the near future of WMDs lies in undeclared economic warfare, such as bio-weapons genetically engineered to kill crops, or non-lethal yet incurable viruses and protozoa like epstein-barr, herpes simplex or toxoplasma that can systematically infect a population, cause chronic fatigue syndrome and sap its productivity, run up healthcare costs, etc, while maintaining plausible deniability. Especially if there is asymmetry in medical or biological capability between the two rivals. Imagine if we did to China's rice or Russia's wheat what the potato blight did to Ireland, or vice versa.
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