2024 was the year we learned to fear nuclear weapons again

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has lived with the threat of nuclear conflagration. The world’s nine nuclear powers have the potential to end life on Earth. In Russia and the United States, the power to launch those weapons that will end the world rests in the hands of a single human being. This has been true for decades, but for too long, the public has been able to safely ignore the threat. But something changed, and people learned to fear them again.

I’ve covered nuclear weapons for a decade, and have watched them go from niche curiosity to mainstream news over the past two years. Something has changed in 2024. The amount of nuclear stories and public interest in nuclear weapons has changed.

Every time Vladimir Putin issues a vague threat, A A series of stories Hits news agencies. Each report to Congress on progress Chinese nuclear arsenal now It gets national press coverage. Three weeks ago, 60 minutes It cut a bunch of its nuclear coverage from the past decade and launched it as Long video on YouTube. The New York Times has spent the past year publishing the unbelievable Investigative journalism About nuclear weapons. One of the biggest TV shows of the year is a video game adaptation set in a world Post-nuclear wasteland.

How did we get here? How did nuclear weapons go from a Cold War curiosity to a major public concern? These weapons have been hovering like the sword of Damocles over our heads all my life, but people have grown accustomed to gracefully ignoring them.

Matt Korda, who tracks nuclear weapons for the Federation of American Scientists, pointed to TV shows like FalloutThe New York Times’ nuclear coverage, and the pervasive sense of doom in American life. “The mood now is apocalypse. Doom. The apocalypse is very much on people’s minds,” he said.

last year, Oppenheimer He told the story of the birth of nuclear weapons. A few months later, Amazon launched He falls, A nihilistic and absurd journey through the nuclear wastelands of California. Both were huge hits.

Korda also pointed to the election, especially when it was between Biden and Trump. “Both were old. Both parties were scrambling to claim that the other candidate posed a historical danger to the country. There were signs of weakness on both sides,” he said.

“I have to think that had a real impact on people who realized that one of these two people would be responsible for a very destructive nuclear arsenal and that there were serious problems with both of them in that regard,” Korda said. “The election has made people more aware that the nuclear system we have deployed is designed, precisely, to concentrate power in the hands of one individual.”

As Biden leaves office, he is 82 years old. Trump will be 78 years old when he takes office, and 82 years old when he leaves. Putin is 72 years old now. Earlier this week, The New York Times published a poll on the president’s sole authority to launch a nuclear weapon. The Times asked all 530 new members of Congress how they felt about the president’s ability Ending all life on Earth. The responses represent an interesting segue into understanding the opinion.

Many were uncomfortable with the president launching nuclear weapons as a first strike, but were comfortable with the president launching nuclear weapons in retaliation for a strike. Democrats described Trump as a freak. Republicans pointed to Biden’s diminished capabilities. Some gave precise and complex answers about deterrence, escalation, and unilateral authority. Many did not answer, some answered yes or no, but those who answered thoughtfully did so with thought and consideration.

It’s something that’s on their mind.

Nuclear threats were part of the first Trump administration, it’s true. But the conversation about nuclear weapons is different now, or even worse. What was scary about the first Trump administration was the arrogant way in which Mr. Trump made nuclear threats, especially regarding North Korea. “You know, the fall of Fire and Fury in 2017, and then, of course, all the negotiations, which ultimately failed, with Kim Jong Un throughout his presidency.” Gizmodo said.

She also pointed to Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Putin’s constant drumbeat of nuclear threats as fear-mongering. “For the first time, we are facing a country that has made blatant threats to use nuclear weapons,” she said.

“The other thing that accompanied this was the collapse of all the arms control treaties,” Squasoni said. Over the decades, a series of arms control treaties between the United States and Russia have exacerbated tensions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America was helping Russia Dismantle its nuclear weapons And the use of nuclear materials within its nuclear power plants. That’s over.

During the first Trump administration, America withdrew from the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The treaty halted certain types of medium-range nuclear weapons for both countries. A year later, the United States I withdrew The Open Skies Treaty, which allows rival countries to monitor each other openly in order to prevent misunderstandings. In 2023, Russia withdrew from the Nuclear Weapons Test Ban Treaty.

The only remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia is now the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). This Obama-era agreement limits the amount of nuclear warheads both countries can deploy. It will expire in 2026 unless the two sides agree to renew it. But implementing it requires both sides to allow their opponents to inspect nuclear weapons sites. Putin has already said he will not allow the treaty to be enforced and it will likely die.

Add to this the fact that America, Russia, and China are all working to build their nuclear arsenals. China is digging holes in its deserts to fill with new intercontinental ballistic missiles. America is working to modernize its power, and is expected to spend billions of dollars on its silos and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Russia has been testing a new nuclear cruise missile recently Launched a new type Launch of a medium-range ballistic missile over Ukraine in November.

“We are in a new nuclear arms race. This is not just rhetoric,” Joseph Cirincione, a former congressional staffer turned counterproliferation watchdog, told Gizmodo. “There are multibillion-dollar programs underway in nearly all nine nuclear-armed states. Most notably in the United States, Russia and China.

According to Cirincione, the United States spends $70 billion annually on new nuclear weapons and an additional $30 billion on missile defense systems. This money has a tangible impact on the communities in which it is spent. Nuclear weapons distort the reality of the places in which they are located.

In order for the United States to build its new Sentinel ICBMs, it will have to dig massive new silos and build massive underground structures in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and North Dakota. Different parts of this project will touch 23 different states. In places where they build silos, contractors will do so Building temporary cities To accommodate the influx of workers. General Dynamics, the contractor working on new nuclear submarines, He visits schools To teach students what it’s like to work in the nuclear industry and encourage them to build submarines of the future.

All this affects public consciousness. What was once an ancient weapon from a bygone era has come back with a vengeance. It is not an abstract weapon of war, but an integral part of American society. It’s part of the post-World War II myth we tell ourselves and the thing that some say keeps us safe from bigger, more terrible wars.

I think nuclear weapons retain a unique place in Americans’ concerns, in part because the main story we’ve learned about nuclear weapons is that we used them to end war. The second story taught about nuclear weapons is that the United States and Russia have enough of a finger on each other to end the world forever, which means that whenever tensions erupt between the two countries with the largest arsenals, they are a short distance from assuming nuclear oblivion. imminent. “Kelsey Atherton, editor-in-chief at the Center for International Policy, told me.

“To some extent, Americans understand nuclear weapons as what ends major wars, and forget everything else about them, and popular coverage (especially on television) is terrible at putting nuclear weapons in context,” he said. “This means that when something astonishing happens, like the use of intercontinental ballistic missiles in Ukraine, it is filtered through a shallow understanding of nuclear risks, coupled with horrific video.”

This will accelerate. Putin is not going anywhere. China has no reason to slow its nuclear ambitions, and President Trump and the Republican Party want more nuclear weapons, not fewer. We are in a new nuclear age, one in which the age-old fear of total oblivion in nuclear hellfire is more bearable than it has been since the 1980s.

We can seek to understand it, we can pressure our leaders to stop, and we can watch TV shows and movies that help us deal with anxiety. What we cannot do is ignore it.