Explain your answer and be sure to address both sides, discussing why you support one and oppose the other. Be specific and cite any sources you...

The probability of a major conflict happening may be higher now than it was during the Cold War. However, the probability of that conflict being completely catastrophic for all of human civilization has been dramatically reduced. Therefore, I conclude that in the most important sense, we are safer now than we were 30 years ago.

There are international relations scholars who believe otherwise, such as John Mearsheimer who argues that a war between the US and China is likely as China's economic growth continues. In my opinion, this argument neglects the fact that China's economic growth is largely driven by trade with the US; far from making war more likely, China's economic development could make it almost unthinkable, just as war between the US and Germany is now almost unthinkable despite being an event that happened within living memory.

The Doomsday Clock has also been set higher than it was during most of the Cold War, but this is frankly baffling, because during the Cold War we had thousands more nuclear weapons than we do now, and were actively maintaining a policy of rapid and overwhelming nuclear response. Today, even if the worst did come to pass and a fanatical Islamist organization like ISIS obtained and used a nuclear weapon, this would not result in a full-scale nuclear exchange. The absence of a government and cities to target is terrifying in its own way, but it eliminates even the possibility of an overzealous US nuclear response, as there is nothing to aim the nukes at. It would surely trigger a war, and the death toll could be in the millions---but in the Cold War we were talking about billions.

Indeed, I may be wrong to concede even that a major conflict is more likely. Overall the world is quite simply more peaceful now than it was then: "state-based armed conflict declined by 40 percent from 1992 to 2003", reports The Atlantic based on the 2009/2010 Human Security Report, and furthermore "The last ten years have seen fewer war deaths than any decade of the past century."