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 fire. The world’s nine nuclear powers have the capacity to wipe out all life on Earth. In Russia and the United States, the power to launch those weapons that will end the world is in the hands of a single human being. This has been true for decades, but for a long time the public could safely ignore the threat. However, something has changed and people have learned to fear them once again.

I’ve been covering nuclear weapons for a decade and have watched it go from niche curiosity to major news in the last two years. Something changed in 2024. The number of nuclear stories and public interest in nuclear weapons has changed.

Every time Vladimir Putin makes a vague threat, waterfall of stories hits the news wires. Each report to Congress on progress in the chinese nuclear arsenal now gets national press coverage. three weeks ago, 60 minutes He cut a bunch of his nuclear coverage from the last decade and published it as a long video on youtube. The New York Times has spent the last year publishing incredible investigative journalism about nuclear weapons. One of the biggest television shows of the year is an adaptation of a video game set in a postnuclear wasteland.

How do we get here? How did nuclear weapons go from a Cold War curiosity to a major public concern? These weapons have hung like a Sword of Damocles over our heads all my life, but people used to safely ignore them.

Matt Korda, who tracks nuclear weapons for the Federation of American Scientists, pointed to television shows such as Fallthe New York Times’ nuclear coverage and a prevailing sense of doom in American life. “The atmosphere right now is apocalypse. Doomism. The Apocalypse is very present in people’s minds,” he said.

Last year, oppenheimer told the story of the birth of nuclear weapons. A few months later, Amazon launched radioactive dust, a nihilistic and absurd journey through a California wasteland devastated by nuclear energy. Both were huge successes.

Korda also touched on the election, especially when it was between Biden and Trump. “They were both very old. Both parties were at pains to claim that the other candidate was historically dangerous to the country. “There were signs of deterioration on both sides,” he said.

“I have to think that that had a real effect on people recognizing that one of these two people is going to be in charge of a very destructive nuclear arsenal and there are serious problems with both of them in that regard,” Korda said. “The election made people much more aware that the nuclear system we have deployed is designed, specifically, to concentrate power in the hands of a single individual.”

When Biden leaves office, he is 82 years old. Trump will be 78 years old when he takes office and 82 when he leaves office. Putin is 72 years old at the moment. Earlier this week, the New York Times published a poll on the president’s exclusive authority to launch a nuclear weapon. The Times asked the 530 incoming members of Congress how they felt about the President having the ability to end all life on Earth. The responses represent an interesting cross-section of the understanding of an opinion.

Many were uncomfortable with the president launching nuclear weapons as a first strike, but were okay with the president launching nuclear weapons in retaliation for an attack. Democrats called Trump erratic. Republicans pointed to Biden’s diminished capabilities. Some gave nuanced and complicated answers about deterrence, escalation and exclusive authority. Many did not respond and some gave yes or no answers, but those who responded in depth did so with consideration and reflection.

It’s something they have in mind.

Nuclear threats were part of the first Trump administration, it is true. But the conversation around nuclear weapons is different now, and worse. “What was terrifying about the first Trump administration was the arrogant way in which Mr. Trump made nuclear threats, and primarily with respect to North Korea. You know, the Fire and Fury fall of 2017 and then, of course, all the negotiations, which ultimately failed with Kim Jong Un throughout his presidency,” said Sharon Squassoni, a congressional arms control veteran and professor of research at George Washington University. he told Gizmodo.

He also pointed to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Putin’s constant nuclear threats as having stoked fear. “For the first time we find ourselves facing a country that has made blatant threats to use nuclear weapons,” he said.

“The other thing that accompanied that is the collapse of all these arms control treaties,” Squassoni said. For decades, a series of arms control treaties between the United States and Russia reduced tensions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States even helped Russia. dismantle their nuclear weapons and use nuclear material within its nuclear power plants. That’s over.

During the first Trump administration, the United States withdrew from the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty halted specific types of intermediate-range nuclear weapons from both nations. A year later, the U.S. taken of the Open Skies Treaty, which allows rival countries to openly monitor each other to avoid misunderstandings. In 2023, Russia withdrew from a treaty banning nuclear weapons testing.

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 deal limits the number of nuclear warheads both countries can deploy. It will expire in 2026 unless both parties agree to renew it. But to implement it requires both sides to allow their rivals to inspect nuclear weapons sites. Putin has already said that he will not allow the treaty to be implemented and that it will likely disappear.

Added to this is the fact that the United States, Russia and China are accumulating their nuclear arsenals. China is digging holes in its deserts to fill them with new intercontinental ballistic missiles. The United States is modernizing its force and is set to spend billions of dollars on its own silos and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Russia is testing a new nuclear cruise missile and recently launched a new type of a medium-range ballistic missile against Ukraine in November.

“We are in a new nuclear arms race. This is not just rhetoric,” Joseph Cirincione, a former member of Congress turned nuclear proliferation watchdog, told Gizmodo. “There are multibillion-dollar programs underway in almost all of the nine nuclear-armed nations. Especially in the United States, Russia and China.”

According to Cirincione, the United States is spending $70 billion a year on new nuclear weapons and an additional $30 billion on missile defense systems. That money has a tangible effect on the communities where it is spent. Nuclear weapons distort the reality of the places where they exist.

To build its new Sentinel-class ICBMs, the United States will have to dig massive new silos and build huge underground structures in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and North Dakota. Various parts of this project will touch 23 different states. Where silos are built, contractors build temporary cities to accommodate an influx of workers. General Dynamics, a contractor working on new nuclear submarines, school visits teach students what it’s like to work in the nuclear industry and offer them the opportunity to build submarines in the future.

All of this has an effect on public consciousness. What was once an ancient weapon from a bygone era has returned 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 what, some say, keeps us safe from bigger, more terrible wars.

“I think nuclear weapons retain a unique place in Americans’ fears, in part because the main story taught about nuclear weapons is that we used them to end a war. The second story that teaches about nuclear weapons, that the United States and Russia have signed up enough to wipe out the world forever, means that every time tensions break out between the two states with the largest arsenals, there is a short path to assume that nuclear oblivion is imminent. Kelsey Atherton, editor-in-chief of the Center for International Policy, told me.

“In a sense, Americans understand nuclear weapons as what ends major wars and forget everything else about them, and popular coverage (especially on television) is horrendous about putting nuclear weapons in context,” he said. “Which means that when something surprising happens, like the use of IRBMs in Ukraine, it is filtered through the most superficial understanding of nuclear risk, along with an apocalyptic video.”

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

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