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 ability to end all life on Earth. In Russia and the United States, the power to launch the weapons of the end of the world is in the hands of a single human being. This has been true for decades, but for a long time, the public has been able to safely ignore the threat. Something has changed though, and people have learned to fear again.

I’ve been covering nuclear weapons for about a decade, and I’ve seen them go from a niche curiosity to major news in the past two years. Something has changed in 2024. The amount of nuclear stories and public interest in nuclear weapons has changed.

Whenever Vladimir Putin makes a vague threat, a cascade of stories tap the news threads. Any report to Congress on the progress in the China’s nuclear arsenal now it receives national press coverage. three weeks ago, 60 minutes cut together a bunch of its nuclear cover from the last decade and released it as a long video on YouTube. The New York Times has spent the last year publishing incredible stories investigative journalism about nukes. One of the biggest TV shows of the year is an adaptation of a video game set in a post-nuclear deserts.

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

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

Last year, Oppenheimer told the story of the birth of nuclear weapons. A few months later, Amazon released it Fall out, a nihilistic and absurd journey through a nuclear-ravaged California desert. Both were huge hits.

Korda also pointed to the election, especially when it was between Biden and Trump. “They were both very old. Both parties were trying to say that the other candidate was historically dangerous for the country. There were signs of degradation on both sides,” he said.

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

As Biden leaves office, he is 82 years old. Trump will be 78 when he takes office and 82 when he leaves it. Putin is 72 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 incoming members of Congress how they feel the president has the ability end all life on Earth. The responses represent an interesting cross-section of understanding an opinion.

Many were uncomfortable with the president launching nuclear weapons as a first strike, but fine with the president launching nuclear weapons in retaliation for a strike. Democrats have called Trump erratic. Republicans have pointed to Biden’s diminished abilities. Some gave nuanced and complicated answers about deterrence, escalation and sole authority. Many did not answer, and some answered yes or no, but those who answered in depth did so with consideration and thought.

It is something that is in mind.

Nuclear threats were part of the first Trump administration, it’s true. But the conversation around nukes is different now, and worse. “What was scary about the first Trump administration was the cavalier way in which Mr. Trump made nuclear threats, and especially with regard to North Korea. So you know, the fire and fury of 2017 and after , of course, all the negotiations, which ultimately failed with Kim Jong Un throughout his presidency,” Sharon Squassoni, veteran congressional arms control and research professor at George Washington University. he told Gizmodo.

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

“The other thing that has come with this 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 have reduced tensions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America was also helping Russia dismantle their nuclear weapons and use the nuclear material in their nuclear power plants. It’s finished.

During the first Trump administration, America abandoned the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty would freeze the two nations’ specific types of nuclear weapons with an intermediate range. A year later, the United States pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty, which allows rival countries to openly monitor each other to prevent misunderstandings. In 2023, Russia withdrew from a treaty that banned 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 agreement limits the number of nuclear warheads the two countries can deploy. It will expire in 2026 unless both sides agree to renew it. But its application 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 enforced and that he will probably die.

Add to this the fact that America, Russia and China are all building up their nuclear arsenals. China is digging holes in its deserts to fill with new intercontinental ballistic missiles. America is modernizing its force and is going to spend billions of dollars on its silos and ICBMs. Russia is testing a new nuclear cruise missile and recently launched a new type of an intermediate-range ballistic missile to Ukraine in November.

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

According to Cirincione, the United States spends $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 facilities in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and North Dakota. Different parts of this project touch 23 different states. In the places where they build silos, the contractors built temporary cities to accommodate an influx of workers. General Dynamics, a contractor working on new nuclear submarines, visit the schools to teach students what it is like to work in the nuclear industry and launch them on the construction of submarines in the future.

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

“I think nuclear weapons retain a unique place in the fears of Americans, in part because the main story taught about nuclear weapons is that we used them to end a war. The second story taught about nuclear weapons, which the United States and Russia have enough pointed at each other to end the world forever, means that whenever tensions flare between the two states with the largest arsenals, it is a short walk to assume nuclear oblivion is imminent,” Kelsey Atherton, Editor-in-Chief of the Center for International Policy told me.

“In a sense, Americans understand nukes as what ends big wars, and forget about all the rest of them, and popular coverage (especially on television) is terrible at putting nukes 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, paired with an apocalyptic video.”

This will speed it up. Putin is not going anywhere. China has no reason to slow down its nuclear ambitions and President Trump and the GOP want more nuclear not less. We are in a new nuclear age, one where the old fear of total oblivion in nuclear hell is more possible than it has been since the 1980s.

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