What if Russia detonates a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine?
A Russian battlefield nuke breaks the post-1945 taboo — the deepest risk-off in this set: VIX up ~20, Nasdaq -9, crypto and credit hammered, only primes green. No clean analogue exists; the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is the reference point, where the sell-off was sharp but the V-shaped recovery was even faster once de-escalation began. Forward angle: with no Cold-War-era circuit breakers and 24/7 crypto, the initial air-pocket would be more violent and gold/Treasuries the only real haven bid.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Russia detonates a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon, shattering the post-1945 nuclear taboo. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.