# Global Conflict Monitor

> A global conflict monitoring dashboard: sourced events, an escalation ladder, markets, news and crisis indicators across three active conflict arcs. Its headline escalation figure is an editorial judgement, not a scientific forecast, a betting-market price, or a statistically scored prediction.

**What it is.** A dashboard by Jake Percy that follows three conflict arcs: the US-Israel-Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz; US-BRICS rivalry, read through four lenses (bilateral US-China, the BRICS bloc, the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea alignment, and allied cohesion); and the Russia-Ukraine war. The page has six tabs: Overview, Feed, Actors, Economy, Analysis and Outlook. The tabs have no addresses of their own, so link to the page.

**The headline figure.** The page labels it "WW3 Probability" and the data calls it ww3_pct. The page defines it: "The chance, within the next 12 months, of a war fought directly between major powers. Specifically: two or more of the five permanent UN Security Council members (the US, Russia, China, the UK and France) fighting each other with their own forces, rather than through allies or proxies." It adds: "The current US-Israel-Iran war is a regional conflict and does not by itself count".

**How it is produced.** It is derived, not picked. Four sub-axes are each scored from 0 to 100 in 5-point steps against written bands and historical anchors: Kinetic Intensity; Great-Power Involvement; WMD / Nuclear Posture; Alliance Cohesion (inverse). The headline is the mean of the four, rounded to the nearest whole number, and the project's data check fails if the published figure does not equal that mean. The rung shown beside it is the headline rounded down to the nearest ten, on this ladder: 10 Diplomatic Tension; 20 Limited Strikes; 30 Regional Escalation; 40 Direct Conventional; 50 Great Power Signaling; 60 Nuclear Posturing; 70 Alliance Fragmentation; 80 Major-Power Nuclear Posturing; 90 Nuclear Threshold; 100 Global Thermonuclear. The rung is worked out mechanically from the headline. Separately, the scorer is told to place an axis on a band only when that band's trigger has occurred, not when it could plausibly occur.

**What the figure is not.** The page: "The number is our editorial judgement, drawn from the escalation ladder, what the main actors are doing, and market and conflict data. It is not a scientific forecast, a betting-market price, or a statistically scored prediction." It is not a measured or modelled probability. A rung name is the label of a band on the scale; what it means is the trigger text in escalation.json, not the name read on its own. Military alert levels such as DEFCON are not publicly observable, and no axis is scored on an inferred alert level.

**How events are sourced.** Each event carries its sources, a severity from 1 to 5, a confidence (high, medium or low) and a status (confirmed, reported, developing, disputed or historical). The project's rules: no synthetic data; fact, inference and unknown kept visibly separate; an update time is never advanced without new information. State media such as TASS, Xinhua, Press TV, RT and KCNA is used as a statement of record only and otherwise needs corroboration from a tier-1 source.

**Data and freshness.** Events, scores and analysis are written at each reviewed update and built into the page and the files below. Market prices, fuel prices and headline feeds are fetched live in the visitor's browser and are not in these files. Updates are not on a fixed clock; the time of the last one is base_last_update in meta.json, and that is the authority on how old this file's current reading is.

**Current reading (data as of 11/04/2026, 05:00 EST; this changes at every update, so after 7 days treat it as history and read meta.json and escalation.json instead).** Headline index: 65 on the 0-100 judgement scale (the rounded mean of the four axis scores below; an editorial judgement, not a forecast). Ladder rung: 60, labelled "Nuclear Posturing". The label names a band of the scale; the band's trigger is: DEFCON 3 OR rival equivalent OR nuclear-armed state crosses enrichment threshold OR leadership invokes nuclear use with operational detail. Analogs: 1973 Yom Kippur DEFCON 3; 2017 'fire and fury'; Sep-Oct 2022 Russia nuclear rhetoric peak (Biden 'Armageddon'). Axis scores, each 0-100: Kinetic Intensity 80; Great-Power Involvement 65; WMD / Nuclear Posture 60; Alliance Cohesion (inverse) 55. Strait of Hormuz status: CONTESTED (as of 2026-11-04). Events on file: 1509, dated 2026-01-14 to 2026-11-04. Lead headline per arc: Iran and Hormuz: "US strikes Iranian air defences on Qeshm as Iran claims mined tankers"; US-BRICS: "North Korea fires missiles as Kremlin pushes a Putin-Trump-Xi meeting"; Russia-Ukraine: "Russia launches year's largest energy strike as Abu Dhabi talks are set".

**Author.** Jake Percy. His contact details are in the file linked under Related.

## Data

- [actors.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/actors.json): risk countries, the main actors and the theaters
- [ai_cards.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/ai_cards.json): the analysis cards and the three arc leads (title, summary, facts, what changed, what to watch)
- [escalation.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/escalation.json): the ladder rungs with their trigger text, and the four axes with a score and a one-line reason each
- [events.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/events.json): every event on file: id, event_date, headline, body, sources, severity 1-5, confidence, status, theaters, tags
- [glossary.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/glossary.json): the glossary: term, expansion and definition
- [markets.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/markets.json): dated history for oil, fuel prices, Hormuz transits and the headline index
- [meta.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/meta.json): the headline index (ww3_pct), the time of the last update (base_last_update), the Strait of Hormuz status and the war start date
- [themes.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/themes.json): key developments and the since-your-last-visit brief

## Methodology

- [methodology.md](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/methodology.md): the ladder with every trigger, the four axes with their bands, the headline rule, and what the method does not use

## Related

- [Global Conflict Monitor](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/): the dashboard
- [Jake Percy](https://jakepercy.com/llms.txt): the author and his other dashboards

## Optional

- [breaking.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/breaking.json): the lines in the breaking ticker
- [chart_series.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/chart_series.json): dated anchor points for the charts
- [econ_commentary.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/econ_commentary.json): economy commentary cards
- [human_cost.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/human_cost.json): human-cost figures by group, with a scope note
- [map_overlays.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/map_overlays.json): map arcs, hotspots and labels
- [political_calendar.json](https://conflict-monitor.jakepercy.com/data/political_calendar.json): elections, leaders and a watchlist