The Threat of Nuclear War The threat of nuclear war puts enough stress on people that an accidental nuclear war could be the result. With more and more of the superpowers defences being controlled by complex computers, the chance of a malfunction increases as well. Add this to normal human error and governmental mistakes and you have a recipe for disaster. For this paper I will be describing examples and systems of the United States, as Canada has no nuclear weapons, and the USA's information is more readily available than the other nuclear equipped countries. "Accidental nuclear war" is a term for a very broad subject,