The killing of 26 civilians would be bad news anywhere in the world, but in Kashmir, it could be far worse. Tensions between the two nations have always been high, ever since they were split up in the partitioning of British India in 1947, but in recent years they have increased still further.

Kashmir is often at the centre of those tensions. Although formally part of India, it has been granted special, largely autonomous status since partition, but in 2019 India effectively ended that, leading Pakistan to downgrade diplomatic relations and suspend trade. 

Last week’s attacks have seemingly brought the two countries to the brink of conflict: India’s government accused Pakistan of supporting the attack, while Pakistan said it expected a retaliatory assault by Indian forces.

A war could have profound consequences. India is increasingly a manufacturing powerhouse; notably, it is the world’s largest supplier of generic pharmaceutical drugs. India also sits upstream of its neighbor in the huge Indus river system, which Pakistan relies on for its agriculture and energy generation: after the attacks, New Delhi suspended the 65-year-old Indus Water Treaty pledging not to limit water flows, raising fears that it could use water as a weapon. And, of course, both countries have nuclear weapons: an escalating conflict between the two could lead to history’s first nuclear exchange.

All that makes it vital to understand the likely outcomes of the attack. The Swift Centre, a not-for-profit which helps organisations improve their ability to predict and respond to the future, commissioned its global network of professional, award-winning forecasters to make rapid predictions of those outcomes. Specifically, the organisation’s forecasters looked at the chance of conflict itself; and then, if that conflict does happen, how likely a major escalation would be, the likely impacts on pharmaceutical exports, the Indus Water Treaty, and the risks of nuclear war.

Q1: Will the national military forces, militia, and/or law enforcement personnel of India and Pakistan engage in a lethal confrontation resulting in at least 100 uniformed casualties before May 15?

Average forecast: 8.5%, range 2% to 28%

The forecasters were first asked how likely they thought a significant conventional conflict was: specifically, a conflict causing at least 100 uniformed casualties between the two countries in the next two weeks.

They thought it was relatively unlikely, although not out of the question, and some thought the risk was significant.

Usually, forecasters start by trying to assess the base rate of such events: how often they happen in ordinary times, an initial position which can then be updated with new information. 

One of them noted that while tensions are high and occasional border disputes happen, large armed conflicts between official state forces are rare: “the 1999 Kargil Conflict was the last time that fatalities reached three digits. Before that, it was in 1990.”

There have been smaller skirmishes since then, but deaths have never gone beyond double figures. As a starting point, then, some forecasters thought that the base rate should be low: In the 35 years since 1990 there have been only two conflicts that would have counted, giving an annual base rate of less than 6%. Since the forecast only looks ahead two weeks, the base rate should be correspondingly lower.

Others thought that since some cross-border skirmishing has already begun, a better way to find a base rate would be looking at how many such skirmishes turn into larger conflicts. Since the last official war between the two countries in 1971, one forecaster counted six smaller conflicts, of which, they argued, only one – 1999 – unambiguously reached the threshold for today’s forecast, giving a per-incident base rate of about 15%. 

But India has unequivocally said it would respond, and Pakistan has begun moving troops into Kashmir. “Clearly this is the most significant crisis facing the two countries since 2019,” one said. Another argued that “India-Pakistan conflicts have generally been nothingburgers over the last few decades” but there are reasons to think that this time is different: levels of nationalism are extremely high in both countries, and animosity has been growing; Pakistan is in the grip of a long-running economic and social crisis, and war with India could boost its regime’s faltering legitimacy; and Israel’s attack on Hamas has provided precedent for major cross-border attacks in response to terrorism incidents. Also, the US, usually a broker between the two, appears not to be engaging.

On the other side of the ledger, two weeks is a very short time, and “nuclear deterrence, economic fragility, and third-party diplomatic pressure” all act as brakes on escalation, a forecaster argued.

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Q2. Will the total combined number of fatalities among the national military forces, militia, and/or law enforcement personnel of India and Pakistan exceed 1,000 before June 30, 2025?

If there are 100 or more uniformed casualties by May 15: 19% (range 3.6% to 35%)

If there are fewer than 100 uniformed casualties by May 15: 2.3% (range 0.5% to 8.5%)

The forecasters were also asked about the chance of a larger war breaking out this summer. Specifically they were asked the probability of it if the smaller 100-casualty conflict happened, and if it didn’t.

In short, they thought that if there weren’t 100 casualties by May 15, it was very unlikely (2.3% chance). Some went as high as 8.5%, but on the whole they thought that it is “really unlikely that there will be nothing for 15 days then something this huge.”

But if there are 100 or more casualties, then the probability of a serious war starts to get very worrying. One of the more optimistic forecasters said that even if the number is reached, “the goal of both sides will be to tamp down hostilities before they get out of control,” but others were far less sanguine: 100 casualties would imply “fierce and fraught” fighting, and emotions would be running high in both countries, increasing the chance of escalation. “If there are 100 or more fatalities in the next two weeks, then I see a one-in-three probability of reaching four digits by June 30.”

Q3. Will the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) between India and Pakistan, which governs the distribution of water from the Indus River basin, be fully reinstated by December 31st, 2025?

If there are fewer than 100 uniformed casualties by May 15: 67% (range 40% to 98%)

If there are 100 or more uniformed casualties by May 15: 22% (range 2.3% to 66%)

The IWT is a point of significant tension between India and Pakistan, as noted above. India’s cabinet announced on April 23, after the Kashmir attacks, that the treaty was “held in abeyance with immediate effect, until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism.”

It’s the first time the treaty has ever been suspended since its 1960 introduction, including during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistan wars and many smaller conflicts.

The forecasters therefore felt that assuming the skirmishing dies down before 100 deaths are reached, it is likely to be reinstated. However, if there is a significant conflict – as in the 100 deaths scenario – “it will be politically more difficult for both sides to reinstate the treaty before the end of the year,” one forecaster argued. 

One forecaster thought that India might see the conflict as a pretext to end a treaty which it no longer wants to abide by, “to claim more of the water for consumption and power generation.” A larger-scale attack makes that pretext stronger.

On the other hand, there does not seem to be provision in the treaty for either side to unilaterally exit, making the pretext weaker, and China – which controls the headwaters of the Indus and thus has leverage over India – would likely put pressure on New Delhi.

Some forecasters noted that the outcome is more likely to be symbolic than practical, since India probably does not have the capability to significantly alter the course of the Indus, but one argued that recent infrastructure improvements “provide the capacity to store the water on a massive scale, which allows India to more meaningfully leverage water as a weapon of war in the longer term.”

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Q4. What will be the total value, in USD, of pharmaceutical exports from India during the calendar year 2025?

If there are 100 or more uniformed casualties by May 15: $29 billion (80% confidence interval: $22 billion to $34 billion)

If there are fewer than 100 uniformed casualties by May 15: $31 billion (80% confidence interval: $24 billion to $35 billion)

India’s generic pharmaceuticals industry accounts for around one-25th of its total exports, and the sector has been growing at spectacular rates for the last several years. If a war halted or significantly reduced them, it would hurt both India’s economy and several countries’ medical supply stocks. 

The forecasters felt that even in the event of a conflict causing 100 or more casualties, the impact on Indian pharma was likely to be low. “Only a major, massively destructive full-blown war will significantly affect Indian pharmas and their exports,” one forecaster. 

Partly that is because Pakistan is only a small export market, while the US accounts for around $7 billion of the roughly $30 billion exported a year, and Washington would be unlikely to reduce those purchases as a result of a war.

One forecaster noted that two major Indian ports are in Gujarat, a state on the border with Pakistan, which might be a problem for exports should a war break out. But they also said that the bulk of pharmaceutical exports go through the port in Mumbai, further south and likely outside any naval conflict zones. They also said that the war would be unlikely to involve naval battles: “Air strikes and special forces/ground forces have been the preferred responses in previous conflicts.”

Several forecasters thought that a much more imminent threat to the Indian pharma sector was US tariffs.

Q5. Will either India or Pakistan use a nuclear weapon, including tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons, in the context of a military conflict between India and Pakistan?

If there are 100 or more uniformed casualties by May 15: 3.3% (range: 0% to 5%)

If there are fewer than 100 uniformed casualties by May 15: 1.6% (range: 0% to 1.4%)

Surely the question that weighs most heavily on people’s minds. Reassuringly, the forecasters felt that a nuclear war was unlikely even in the event of a significant conflict, although a one-in-30 chance is still worryingly high. “I just don’t think India and Pakistan want the current conflict to escalate,” one said, “and I can’t imagine either side wanting or planning to use a nuclear weapon first.” So unless the two sides misread each other’s intentions, or there’s some sort of accident – not impossible in a tense and volatile environment with two countries with poorly defined chains of command – then nuclear war is unlikely.

One raised the possibility of a “mad major” scenario, in which a local commander has launch control over tactical nuclear weapons and uses one to slow an enemy advance, but “while there is uncertainty over Pakistan’s safety mechanisms on nuclear weapons,” it does seem that the warheads are kept separate from launch vehicles, making such an outcome less likely.

Another forecaster argued that the “mad major” might not be necessary: Pakistani military doctrine explicitly envisages using tactical nuclear weapons if they are losing a conventional war. And its threshold of when to use nuclear weapons is “unclear and relatively uncommunicated”, meaning India’s efforts to fight a limited war against it could accidentally trigger it.

All that said, the forecasters all felt that in either scenario, nuclear escalation was an unlikely outcome. The two sides have had nuclear weapons for decades now, and even previous major conflicts, like 1999, did not lead to nuclear exchange. “The Kargil War has shown that it is possible to prevent nuclear escalation even at higher casualty levels in conventional conflict,” one said, although “a massive conventional escalation threatening the territorial status quo in Kashmir could indeed trigger a Pakistani nuclear reaction, even if only tactical.”

Most alarmingly, perhaps, Vladimir Putin has discussed the possibility of using nuclear weapons and his subordinate, the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, has called for the use of a “tactical” nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine. We wanted to assess how likely it is that a nuclear bomb might be used in the war. As well as that, what factors might increase the chance of that happening — if Ukraine continues to retake territory, or if Putin begins to lose his grip on power, will that increase or reduce the likelihood of a nuclear attack? Our forecasters were asked:

Will a nuclear weapon be detonated in Europe as an act of hostility before 30 April 2023?

Median forecast: 9%

That’s an extraordinarily high risk for a (just-over)-six-month period — if that level of danger was constant, there would be less than 20% chance of making it through any given decade without a nuclear explosion. The likelihood that the 75 years since the Second World War would have passed without any atomic bombs going off would be minuscule. But that group’s forecast hides a reasonable amount of variation. Some felt it was as low as 5%; others as high as 20%.

Forecasters were asked several questions about possible milestones in the war, such as Ukraine taking a particular city or region. How likely are those milestones, and if they happen, what will they say about the risk of a nuclear detonation? We asked four pairs of questions about the possible fall of four different cities: Sievierodonetsk, Melitopol, Chaplynka, and Mariupol. For each, we asked:

What is the probability that Ukraine’s armed forces will take control of the city before 1 April 2023?

If Ukraine’s armed forces do take control of the city before 1 April 2023, will a nuclear weapon be detonated in Europe as an act of hostility within the following 30 days?

If the risk of a nuclear weapon being detonated between now and 30 April 2023 is uniform over time, then our 9% forecast implies there is a rolling risk of 1.3% over a 30-day period for the foreseeable future. Here, we use 1.3% as our benchmark for examining the effect of each milestone.

All the forecasters felt that more cities were likely to return to Ukrainian hands. The aggregate forecast was 71% that Sievierodonetsk, just a few miles behind the Russian lines, would fall. One forecaster felt that its loss was “already factored in” to Russian military thinking. Melitopol, in the south-east, and Chaplynka, on the border of the Crimean peninsula in the south, were almost as likely — 48% and 44% likely, respectively.

Sievierodonetsk is a “test” of the risk of nuclear weapons, said one forecaster — it is likely to fall soon, and tactical nuclear weapons could easily be targeted at Ukrainian supply lines, and be used in a comparatively low-stakes way. But another felt that “if Russia was going to use nuclear weapons because of Sievierodonetsk, they probably should have already”. The likelihood of a nuclear weapon being detonated in Europe in the 30 days following the recapture of Sievierodonetsk, Melitopol, and Chaplynka is 3.3%, 5.1%, and 5.5% according to our forecasters. The implication here — with its risk elevated up to four times higher than our baseline monthly figure — is that a nuclear exchange is more likely to occur following exchanges in territorial control.

Mariupol, on the other hand, deep behind Russian lines and symbolically important after its long resistance, was deemed unlikely to fall, with an aggregate estimate of 21%. “In this case, it seems likely that the whole Russian lines have collapsed”, wrote one forecaster. “If Mariupol is taken, it probably means the war is completely lost for Russia, with the possible exception of Crimea”, wrote another.

Most of the forecasters felt that, if nuclear weapons were to be used, it would happen before Mariupol fell: “If they haven’t been used prior to this event, then I highly doubt this would be the turning point”, said one, although another sounded a note of caution: “If Mariupol is re-taken, it would be a devastating blow to Putin, so the risk of a hostile nuclear detonation after the re-capture of Mariupol wouldn’t be entirely eliminated.” Accordingly, if this takes place, our forecasters assign a 1.6% chance of a nuclear weapon being used over the subsequent 30 days — similar to our baseline rolling risk.

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Forecasters were also asked two pairs of questions about wider regions, the oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia:

Will Russia be completely driven from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts before 1 April 2023?

Will Russia lose all of Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts before 1 April 2023?

What effect would the realisation of these scenarios have on the chance of a nuclear attack over the subsequent 30 days?

Driving Russia entirely out of the Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts, in the south of Ukraine, seemed unlikely to most forecasters — with an aggregate forecast of 31% — but it would be a major humiliation if they were. “If Zaporizhia and Kherson fall, Putin is also likely to have few days left,” wrote one. “His troops would be thoroughly demoralised. I would suspect that he would want to make a desperate last stand at the border of Crimea.”

Whether it would increase the risk of nuclear weapons was unclear. “Again, this comes well after the point at which a tactical nuclear weapon ought to be used,” wrote one, although another felt that one might still be used “to deter any further Ukrainian gains in the (more important to Russia) territories of the Donbas and Crimea”. The aggregate forecast of the probability of a nuclear attack in the following month was 3.2%.

The loss of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts — in the east of Ukraine, bordering Russia, filled with Russian-speaking ethnic Russians, and the parts that Russia initially occupied in February — would be especially damaging to Russia’s self-image. “The loss of them would be catastrophic for Putin,” wrote one forecaster, “because it would signal that he could not even hold territory where many of the locals may not oppose his forces”.

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Again, though, it was considered unlikely that both oblasts would be recaptured by Ukraine in the next six months, forecasted to be 18% likely. The risk of nuclear weapon usage 30 days after the realisation of this condition, 1.2%, was deemed to be lower than the baseline risk of 1.3%. “By this point”, according to one forecaster, “Russia will have essentially lost the war, and would have no incentive to launch a nuclear weapon.”

Turning toward the leadership of the countries directly involved in the conflict, we asked the forecasters whether either Vladimir Putin or Volodomyr Zelenskyy leaving office would affect the chance of a nuclear attack.

The chance of Zelenskyy leaving office was considered low — 5%, — without much variance. The only plausible reason the forecasters thought he would leave was if he was killed. If he was killed by a nuclear blast, that might make a second attack more likely, but in general it wasn’t thought that it would increase the risk: “If Zelenskyy dies then everything is up in the air,” said one. “Seems Putin no longer needs to resort to nuclear weapons.”

The chance of Putin leaving office, on the other hand, was thought to be higher — 10.5% — and with much greater variance, with one forecaster as high as 38%. If he leaves, it will not be in triumph. “If Vladimir Putin leaves office, it is likely due to a massive and humiliating defeat in Ukraine,” said one forecaster. It would also mean, they felt, that a nuclear detonation would be less likely. “The cases where Putin leaves office will almost universally involve the invasion being regarded as a complete failure,” said one, “and any replacement is almost certainly not going to escalate it”. They put the chance of a nuclear strike in the month after Putin leaves office at 2%.

A more complex scenario is one in which Putin faces a coup attempt. Forecasters were asked:

Will there be an attempted coup to remove Putin resulting in more than five arrests before 1 April 2023?

The forecasters again thought this to be unlikely but not vanishingly so: 15% (with significant variation — one put it at 33%). But they were unsure about whether it would raise or lower the risk of a nuclear blast: some felt it would make Putin edgy; others felt it would make him less willing to do anything that would further undermine his standing, such as starting a nuclear war.

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While the forecasters considered a broad range of factors that affect escalatory scenarios (from Russian military doctrine to the chance of nuclear launch orders being disobeyed), we have not identified any highly probable scenarios that turn the possibility of nuclear escalation into an inevitability. However, our forecasters clearly associate major losses in Russian-controlled territory with a higher chance of nuclear escalation. Ukrainian recapture of cities in the Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts, for instance, may coincide with increasingly desperate responses from Russia.

It’s important to note that this is only forecasting the chance of at least one bomb going off, somewhere in Europe. The obvious follow-up question would be: if one does, what are the likely outcomes? Will it lead to reprisals by NATO and the West on Russia? If so, will they be conventional or nuclear?

***

A version of this research first appeared on the Swift Centre.

We wanted to look at the future of the war. Will it escalate — with the use of chemical or biological weapons, or expanding into attacks beyond the border of Ukraine? Or might the two sides reach a ceasefire? Fifteen forecasters with exceptional track records gathered to discuss these three questions:

1. Before the 1st of August 2023, will chemical or biological weapons be used in the Russia-Ukraine war?
2. Before the 1st January 2023, will there be a full-scale ceasefire declared between Russia and Ukraine?
3. Will events involving Russian security forces result in 25 or more fatalities on a Nato member state’s territory before the end of 2023?

Before the 1st of August 2023, will chemical or biological weapons be used in the Russia-Ukraine war?
Median forecast: 12%

The use of proscribed weapons of mass destruction — by either side, although most people think Russian rather than Ukrainian forces are more likely to deploy them — would mark a significant escalation in the conflict, and a further breach with international laws and norms.

All forecasters think this outcome unlikely, although there is a reasonable spread — one puts it at a 1% chance, while another goes as high as 23%. It’s worth being clear that 12% is not a trivial chance: if the use of chemical or biological weapons would have serious repercussions, such as bringing Nato forces into the war (or simply killing large numbers of people with the weapons themselves), then that level of risk would be worth taking seriously. That said, there are chemical weapons and chemical weapons. Poison gas dropped on a city is very different from phosphorus weapons used against combatants.

One forecaster, who puts the outcome at 14% likely, reasons that Russia clearly has no moral problem with using chemical weapons. Putin’s regime has used them for targeted assassinations before, as in Salisbury. But it hasn’t deployed them in battlefield situations, even during the siege of Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, “which would have been an ideal tactical condition to use them in order to kill or force out deeply entrenched opposition forces.” “I don’t think anyone wants to really escalate in this direction,” the forecaster writes, “but I can see some borderline cases of phosphorus use.”

Another points out that there are issues with resolving the question. There are rumours that Russia already has used chemical weapons in Mariupol, delivered by a small drone — but “given that the source for these claims was the Azov Battalion and the inability of any external observer to verify them, it’s hard to give them much credence”. They note that more clear-cut uses of chemical weapons in Syria remain controversial. So the chance of the question being resolved positively are somewhat smaller than the chance of chemical weapons being used.

Most of the forecasters feel that the upsides of using these weapons were low. “I don’t think chemical weapons or typical bioweapons are very tactically useful”, writes one. “It’s fairly likely they didn’t use them in Mariupol, a long and bloody siege; it raises the question ‘Where else might they use them?’”, writes another. And they feel that the downsides are large and obvious: not simply the risk of blowback from Nato, but the cost elsewhere. “Some level of semi-explicit Chinese political support is required [for Russian war aims], and this gets harder to maintain if WMDs are used”, they write. “It would also make it harder for European states to push Ukraine to accept a ceasefire that cedes Crimea and Donbas.”

That said, forecasters whose estimates were on the higher end pointed out that expecting Russia to make sensible, rational decisions was not always a smart bet. “There are far more negative political ramifications for using chemical weapons than tactical or terror gains from them to make it a good decision”, one writes. “But I’m not lower than 15% because Russia has already made many bad decisions.” Escalation of the war via proscribed WMDs would indeed be risky, writes another, but: “Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a fairly risky decision, so it seems that he is certainly willing to take measures that Western geopolitical analysts previously thought were extremely unlikely.”

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Before the 1st January 2023, will there be a full-scale ceasefire declared between Russia and Ukraine?

Median forecast: 21%

While the use of WMDs would represent an escalation, the war could go the other way, and begin to wind down. But while the forecasters felt that was more likely than the deployment of weapons of mass destruction, they all — even the most optimistic — still feel that it’s an unlikely outcome. The highest probability given was 30%.

For a ceasefire to become a realistic possibility, one points out, at least one side in the conflict would have to see diminishing political support for the war. Similarly, they would have to see some sort of tactical advantage in ceasing hostilities for a period. But it is doubtful whether Ukrainian public opinion will shift, at least until the winter, if limited gas supplies and damage to electricity generation lead to widespread energy shortages. (As a second forecaster writes: “The will of the public in Ukraine is definitely not in favour of accepting Russian aggression at this time.”) Despite heavy Ukrainian losses, they have manpower reserves, a constant flow of Western weapons, and training support to use those weapons.

On the Russian side, “casualties seem to be running at an unknown but politically manageable level, and the Russian state has the financial resources to shore up at least temporary population support with higher levels of social spending,” the same forecaster writes. The regime is insulated from the worst of the political consequences of casualties since most of the urban warfare has been fought by troops from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics rather than those recruited in Russia itself. And Putin’s industrial base should be able to support the warfare we’re currently seeing — “slow concentrated troop movements preceded by the application of massive artillery bombardments, the kind of thing the Russian military is good at” — for “many years to come”, even with Western sanctions.

There is, writes one forecaster, “some fairly low chance the Ukrainians could come under pressure from the central Europeans to move towards peace” as the economic consequences of the war continue to bite, and as concerns grow about a widening of the war. “But I’m reasonably pessimistic, as I think Ukraine will have to be in a different position or hold quite a different mentality to be able to give up any of its land for a ceasefire to hold,” they continue. “I think the Ukrainian leadership will pretty much fight until they are not supported by the West.” The West’s stockpiles of weapons and munitions are depleting, but there’s plenty left in reserve, especially if you include lower-tech weapons than those currently being sent.

In the credit column, the political leaders might not be implacably opposed to a ceasefire. Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he wants the war to end, notes one forecaster, “and seems somewhat willing to compromise for that to occur”. Meanwhile Putin “could be open to a deal taking place if he still has some way to save face and convince Russians that it was still a victory, such as the capture of a small but strategic piece of territory”. “Six months is a long time”, writes one forecaster, and the political and military situations could change dramatically. But nonetheless, it remains unlikely. “I could see a small-scale ceasefire for a couple of cities for a short humanitarian window — early March had one for two cities”, says another. “But a full-country ceasefire would be a much less likely scenario.”

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Will events involving Russian security forces result in 25 or more fatalities on a Nato member state’s territory before the end of 2023?

Median forecast: 8%

Not long ago, it looked as though there was a chance that conflict would expand. The Russian port of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea is cut off from the rest of Russia by a 40-mile stretch of Lithuania known as the Suwalki Corridor. In June Lithuania said it would restrict exports of goods into Kaliningrad through its territory. Russia responded with threats to seize the Corridor and join its territories together.

That seems to have eased off. “The chance of something going wrong in Lithuania seems much lower than it did a couple of weeks ago,” one forecaster says, “but it was a good example of how things can escalate due to nested games and mistakes. There is plenty of scope for conflict spillovers and accidents as well as intentional escalation.”

Nonetheless, the forecasters think most of the Russian rhetoric is “chest-thumping without action” and that “actually Russia is very careful about going to war with Nato.” If they were to do it, Lithuania is the likely starting point, but “it would be a massive escalation and I think both sides really want to avoid it”.

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Still, there are other ways for the question to be resolved positively other than a deliberate action in a Baltic state. One would be a stray missile hitting a Nato country. Another would be the accidental shooting-down of a passenger plane. Then there are other conflicts Russia is embroiled in. “Russia and Turkey have a ceasefire in Syria”, notes one forecaster, and Turkey is a Nato member. But that is also doubtful: “There have been no deaths caused by Russian soldiers on Turkish soil. A Turkish F4 was shot down by Syrian forces in 2012, but that incident was over international airspace and did not involve Russia.”

Russian attacks on military bases near the Ukrainian city of Lviv could also lead to the question being resolved positively. Lviv is 70 kilometres from the Polish border and there are military bases within 10 kilometres of that border, at least one of which has been attacked already. A missile launched from the Black Sea that misses its target could conceivably hit Poland.

The forecasters agree that intentional escalation seems far too risky to occur. “If this were to happen, I think it would either be the result of an accident or because a small amount of Russian forces or a Nato member’s forces attacked the other side without permission”, writes one. Even that is dubious, but if it were to happen, “I think both leaders would try to de-escalate just because the ramifications would be too terrifying (a nuclear exchange) if they didn’t defuse the situation.” Taking that into account, one forecaster points out that, “One and a half years are an eternity here, and the situation could change”, so they kept an 8% chance to represent the uncertainty.

…

The most likely outcome is that the war does not escalate either with the use of chemical and biological weapons, or the deaths of significant numbers of people on Nato soil through Russian action. That’s mainly because the risks of widening the conflict would be significant and the benefits nebulous for all parties. Doubt does remain though. We know that the Russian leadership has been willing to make high-risk decisions in the past, not least launching the invasion in the first place.

On the other side, an imminent ceasefire is also unlikely, because public opinion in both Russia and Ukraine would be against it, and both countries have the manpower and resources to continue fighting, Russia through its own industrial base, still producing though affected by sanctions, and Ukraine with Western support.

***

A version of this research first appeared on the Swift Centre.

However, the spread of monkeypox has been very different to the spread of Covid. While Covid is spread through the air, by droplets on patients’ breath, monkeypox is mainly spread by skin-to-skin contact. And because the initial outbreak arose among gay and bisexual men — many of the initial cases can be traced back to a Pride event in the Canary Islands, a sauna in Madrid, and other venues — the large majority of cases have, so far, been among men who have sex with men (MSM).

That said, the disease is not specific to gay men, or sexually transmitted in the strict sense of the word, and could reach the wider community. Even if it doesn’t, it’s important to get a sense of how far monkeypox could spread among MSM, and to try to minimise its damage and understand the scale of the public health problem. With that in mind, we gathered ten forecasters for a discussion of the likely outcomes of the monkeypox outbreak — to try to predict both the likely size of the outbreak, and how it will look: will it break out of the MSM community in large numbers?

A note on forecasting methods:

The classic “superforecasting” model requires forecasters to give a percentage probability for a certain outcome, such as “Britain will vote to remain in the EU, 66%”. Forecasting skill is graded on how well-calibrated those forecasts are — do your 66% forecasts come in 66% of the time? — and also how confident they are: getting a 90%-confident forecast right is rewarded more highly than getting a 55%-confident forecast right. (On the other hand, getting a 90%-confident forecast wrong is punished more severely than getting a 55%-confident forecast wrong.)

In this case, we do something similar, but, in a way, reversed. The forecasters gave a range of values that they thought was 80% likely to contain the true outcome. So, for instance, if one thought that it was 90% likely that the number of monkeypox cases in the UK before the end of 2022 would be higher than 500, and 90% likely that it would be lower than 10,000, their 80% range is 500 to 10,000.

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They also each gave a 50% value, which you can most easily think of as their central, most likely estimate. The forecasters will be graded on whether their 80% forecasts come true 80% of the time, as usual, but instead of being rewarded for making higher-confidence predictions, they’ll be rewarded for giving narrower ranges. For each question, we also gave a median of the forecasters’ 10%, 50% and 90% predictions — that is, if you took all 11 predictions and put them in a row from smallest to largest, we’d take the one in the middle.

The questions:

How many cases of monkeypox will there have been worldwide by the end of 2022?

• Median 10% estimate: 13,500
• Median 50% estimate: 45,000
• Median 90% estimate: 525,000

As of 17 June, there have been 2,103 laboratory-confirmed cases of monkeypox reported to the WHO. The forecasters think that even in a realistic best-case scenario, that number will only be a fraction of the eventual total: the median 10% (that is, low-end) estimate is six times higher. On the other hand, the median upper-end estimate, while a large number — more than half a million — is still negligible compared to the spread of Covid: by the end of 2020, there had been more than 80 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, and many times that number of undetected ones.

Yet it’s important to note that the forecasters’ predictions varied widely. Three of them pointed out that while the virus spreads through skin contact now and has a relatively low R number, it is mutating, and could easily become transmissible. One said: “Multiple somewhat distinct strains have already evolved, which leads me to be concerned that there is a fairly high amount of genetic drift occurring, which could lead to the situation turning into a more detrimental pandemic.”

Another said, citing this paper, that the virus seems to have a very high R within MSM communities, but an R below 1 outside it. (The R value is the number of people the average infected person goes on to infect.) But, they said, “as it spreads more the chance that it mutates to gain a transmissibility advantage increases, quite possibly via the airways”: as a result, that forecaster gave a 90th-percentile forecast of 30 million infections, the highest in the group by a factor of four.

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Other forecasters were more optimistic. One thought that the total would be no higher than 80,000; another, 200,000. Another with a relatively low estimate (median 40,000, 90th percentile 400,000) pointed out that “there has been limited transmission beyond networks of close contacts, so far”. Another, who had a very wide range (from 12,000 to 5 million) said: “R is clearly lower than for Covid, so there clearly is a plausible future where once governments get serious about mitigation it ceases to spread quickly. On the other hand, well, they might not.”

It’s worth noting that these estimates are of the total cases, not just the confirmed ones. (One forecaster said they “expect much of the world is vastly undercounting”.) This means it will be impossible to accurately grade who has got this question right.

How many cases of monkeypox will there have been in the UK by the end of 2022?

• Median 10% estimate: 6,000
• Median 50% estimate: 22,000
• Median 90% estimate: 85,000

As with the worldwide estimates, there was considerable spread. One — the same person who gave a high-end estimate of 30 million in the first question — used the same reasoning to say numbers could get as high as one million in the UK.

On the whole, though, the feeling among the forecasters was that the UK is better placed to control spread than most countries are. “UK monitoring is on the better end,” said one, “and there are initial attempts to vaccinate.”

But there were concerns. “It’s failed to be controlled particularly well so far, despite good monitoring,” one wrote. “It’s on the worse end of what experts would have hoped for a month ago, perhaps because of long incubation periods. There’s still a lot of opportunity for superspreader events, especially given Pride, and relatively little cautiousness so far. But awareness within LGBT communities should slow it down.”

As with the “worldwide” question, the forecasters were talking about the true number of cases, not confirmed cases. However, the monitoring in the UK is likely to be pretty comprehensive, so the two numbers should be comparable.

What percentage of 2022’s worldwide cases will be in men?

• Median 10% estimate: 50
• Median 50% estimate: 94
• Median 90% estimate: 99

At the moment, more than 99% of recorded monkeypox cases worldwide have been among men, suggesting that the spread has been almost exclusively among MSM. The forecasters, on the whole, expected that to remain the same, although they felt that there was a distinct chance, above 10%, that it could spread so rapidly among the general population that it could wash out the male head start altogether. One pointed out that once a disease gets outside the subpopulation in which it started, it can behave very differently depending on the context: “The US currently has a 5:1 male/female ratio of HIV,” wrote one, “while Sub-Saharan Africa has more women with AIDS than men. The modes of transmission do not keep the straight community safe. There are far more straight people than gay people, so once it starts to increase in that community, the potential population is much greater.”

Another forecaster thought that this is essentially the same question as the case-numbers question, somewhat repackaged. If it starts to spread very rapidly, by some other method than skin-to-skin contact, then it will spread outside MSM communities: “I think this is essentially the same as asking the chances it mutates to become more transmissible and spread outside of the networks it’s currently spreading through. It’s very hard for me to estimate this risk, but I think it increases as the case numbers increase.”

All 11 forecasters thought there was at least a 10% chance that cases among women would reach close to 50% of the total, but most thought that that was unlikely: only one put their central estimate at below 90% male, and four had it at 95% or higher.

What percentage of 2022’s UK cases will be in men?

• Median 10% estimate: 55
• Median 50% estimate: 98
• Median 90% estimate: 99

The forecasters felt the story was likely to be largely similar in the UK to worldwide, with some caveats. First, they felt the disease was likely to be better controlled here and to spread more slowly, so the chance of it spreading widely outside MSM communities was smaller, hence the higher median 10% estimate. Second, one noted that the UK’s HIV population has a higher male-to-female ratio than the global average, and used that to extrapolate to monkeypox.

Overall, the forecasters’ attitude can be summed up in this comment: “I think community spread is definitely possible, but founder effects and (reasonably) slow spread will mean the MSM community will still dominate the numbers by the end of the year.” One added that the UK government’s current strategy, of vaccinating high-risk MSM, is very good, and “may solve the problem on its own”. However, they added that public messaging at the moment is not especially useful, since it doesn’t warn at-risk communities, tending to emphasise the risk to wider society rather than to MSM groups. Changing that would, they said, be worthwhile.

Conclusions:

The forecaster group, on the whole, felt that monkeypox will continue spreading, both in the UK and worldwide. However, unless it mutates significantly to become capable of spreading in ways other than through skin contact, they felt that its numbers were likely to remain comparatively low, and that it was most likely to stay chiefly in the MSM community.

Yet they also felt there was a significant tail risk of a much wider impact. They noted that a novel disease which appears to be mutating relatively rapidly has a non-negligible chance of achieving new means of spreading — and that there was a greater than 10% chance of widespread transmission among the wider population, with hundreds of thousands or even millions of cases not unlikely.

***

A version of this research first appeared on the Swift Centre.