For nearly a half-century, the United States and its allies pointed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union and its allies, building ever-more destructive devices and more elaborate delivery systems. At different points throughout the Cold War, one-third of US bombers were airborne and nuclear-armed at any given time, schoolchildren learned “duck and cover” drills to provide at least the illusion of protection against a nuclear attack, and pieces of popular culture like Dr. Strangelove (1962) and The Day After (1983) explored the illogicalities and horrors of a world preparing to destroy itself.

One of the main symbols of this anxiety has been the so-called Doomsday Clock, presented annually by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which shows a time relative to midnight to show how close they think the world is to a nuclear catastrophe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, fears of nuclear war tended to recede, if not fade entirely. There were certainly concerns about “loose nukes” slipping out of the control of a weak Russian state, potentially falling into the hands of criminal or terrorist organizations (fears which reached their apotheosis after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center), and North Korea’s outlaw program became a source of perennial concern, but the good news generally outweighed the bad.