What if Saudi Arabia buys nuclear warheads from Pakistan?
Saudi acquisition of Pakistani warheads is a proliferation shock more than a barrel shock: vol bids, Brent carries a modest premium, equities soften. The reference is the long-rumored Saudi-Pakistan nuclear understanding finally going overt; markets price the tail, not a supply cut. Transmission: Saudi is the swing exporter to Asia and the Fed-adjacent petrodollar anchor; the forward angle is that an overt Sunni bomb pressures the US security umbrella and could, at the margin, accelerate Gulf reserve diversification out of dollars.
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. Riyadh acquires nuclear warheads from Pakistan, igniting a Gulf proliferation cascade. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.