The index, as data

We publish a number: how far five theatres have travelled towards a war between nuclear-armed powers. A number you cannot pull, chart or recompute is not a measurement. It is a logo.

So here it is as data. Free, attribution required, no key, no account, no rate limit.

File	What it is
escalation.json	Everything: the current reading and its arithmetic, all five theatres, all ten levels each with the date it was crossed and the sources for it, and every movement.
escalation.csv	One row per dated observation: date, theatre, theatre_name, level, kind, note. The shape you want for a chart or a back-test.

Both are rebuilt with the site, so they are never staler than the page.

What this is, precisely

It is arithmetic over events that have already happened. Each theatre is scored against one shared ten-level scale, so a 4 in Korea means the same order of danger as a 4 in Europe. The top of that scale is World War III — two nuclear-armed great powers in direct combat — not the end of the world. Weapons of mass destruction are carried on a separate axis, because they can be true at any level. A level is only marked crossed when its published criterion has actually been met and we can link the evidence — the site’s build refuses to publish a level without sources, which is a check on us, not on you.

It is not a forecast and it is not a probability. “75% loaded” is not a 75% chance of anything. We assign no odds to the levels above the current position, because we have no honest basis for one.

It can fall, and it has. Every movement is dated, explained and in the file. If a measure only ever rises, it is a marketing device.

The method is published at how we verify, including the formula, so you can recompute the headline number yourself and tell us if it drifts.

Terms

Licensed CC BY 4.0. Use it commercially, redistribute it, build on it. Credit WW3.press with a link, and do not represent a derived or modified series as ours.

Two things we ask, which are not licence conditions but are the difference between this being useful and being dangerous:

1. Do not present the reading as a probability or a forecast. It is neither.
2. If you correct us, tell us. A mistake in this file is worse than a mistake in an article, because it will be charted. corrections@ww3.press.

If you price this risk for a living

Underwriters, charterers, commodity desks and security teams already pay for geopolitical risk, usually as analyst prose on a quarterly cycle. This is the opposite: a small number of hard, dated, sourced values you can put in a spreadsheet, with the method open to attack.

It is free and it will stay free. If you need something this does not do — a higher publishing cadence, a webhook the moment a level moves, theatres we do not currently track, or the underlying evidence as structured records — write to editor@ww3.press and tell us what you would actually use. We would rather build the thing somebody has asked for than guess.