Nuclear war is our version of the apocalypse—an end to civilization, to history, to life itself, brought about not by divine decree but by man-made folly. Fears of an all-out nuclear exchange haunted the early postwar years and notoriously intensified during the Cold War. Hollywood captured the angst and anxiety in, for example, “On the Beach,” “Fail-Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove.” With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end to the bipolar Cold War rivalry, it seemed for a while as if such fears could be put to rest.
No such luck. The need to “think the unthinkable” has returned with Vladimir Putin’s veiled threat to launch nuclear missiles if Russia feels alarmed by the West’s response to its invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, it is reported that Russia is thinking about putting nuclear weapons in space, while China is rapidly expanding its own nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East, there is an increasingly urgent concern that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and use it on behalf of its geopolitical designs.