For a few hours on Tuesday, Polymarket hosted a bet about the possibility of nuclear war in 2026. The market asked the question “Nuclear weapon detonation by …?” and racked up close to a million dollars in trading volume before Polymarket took the unusual step to remove the market from its website. It did not simply close down the bet, but it’s been “archived” meaning that a record of it no longer exists. It’s strange as many older and paid out bets remain on the site.
Pulling a bet like this is unusual and the company did not respond to 404 Media’s request for an explanation as to why. Word of the nuke bet drew wide attention online from critics already upset about Polymarket for its place in the depravity economy.
“I have not seen anything like this before,” Jon Wolfsthal, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told 404 Media. “As a citizen, it seems dangerous to enable people in power to place bets anonymously on things that might happen, creating an incentive to act on a basis of personal gain and not the national interest.”
Polymarket doesn’t often balk at bets on violence and war. There are multiple markets covering the wars in Ukraine and Iran and also many other bets about nuclear detonations. “Will a US ally get a nuke before 2027?” and “Russia nuclear test by …?” are both still actively trading. An older version of the “nuclear weapons detonation” is still on the site and did almost $3 million in trading before closing and paying out at the end of the 2025. It’s hosted a bet on the same question every year for the past few years.
The gambling market has been under fire this week after gaining a lot of attention for its various bets on the war in Iran. Gamblers spent more than $5 million betting on the question “Will the Iranian regime fall by June 30?” People have been caught manipulating war maps to cash in on frontline advances in Ukraine. And someone made $400,000 using inside knowledge to place bets about the capture of Maduro.
“How ghoulish. Especially given how much insider trading apparently goes on with current events bets,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian and creator of the NUKEMAP, told 404 Media.
Wellerstein said that betting on nuclear war isn’t unprecedented, but that it’s usually tongue-in-cheek and conducted by insiders. “The thing that immediately comes to mind is Fermi’s ‘side bet’ that the Trinity test would destroy the atmosphere in 1945—which was a joke, as nobody would be able to collect if it had happened,” he said.
“A flip of this is in Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine, in which he eschewed paying into a pension in the early 1960s because he thought the odds of a future nuclear war were so high that it was better to spend the money sooner rather than later. So another kind of bet, but a private one,” Wellerstein added. “And whenever experts give ‘odds’ on nuclear use (which the intelligence community does, apparently), they are to some degree indulging in this kind of impulse. But not for the hope of personal profit—usually it is because they want to avoid such an outcome.”
Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has repeatedly called the site “the future of news,” and has suggested that prediction markets give the public a more clear picture of events because money is on the line. The reality is that the financial incentives pervert reality. Nuclear war, it seems, was a bit too dramatic for Polymarket to host a wager on. But Polymarket has few moral qualms, has not told anyone why it “archived” the bet, and it’s possible it did so for some arcane technical reason and not because it got squeamish. Polymarket did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.