Ever since the end of the cold war, the subject of nuclear war and the profound threat it poses to humanity has suffered a “peculiar invisibility.” This is the phrase the German philosopher Günther Anders used in his book The Obsolescence of the Human (1956) to illuminate the roots of the “Apokalypse-Blindheit”—“apocalypse blindness”—that had begun to set in just a few years after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.¹ Seventy years on, despite the construction of gigantic nuclear arsenals and several near catastrophes, the blindness persists.

Today each of America’s fourteen nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines is capable of launching 160 warheads with a combined explosive force of up to 73,000 kilotons, roughly the equivalent of five thousand Hiroshimas. The Russians possess a similar capability. A mere fraction of the nuclear weapons that exist today could kill millions of people within minutes. Hundreds of detonations could ignite massive fires, lofting soot into the atmosphere and blocking sunlight, potentially triggering a nuclear winter. The resulting disruption to global food systems would threaten billions of people with starvation.

This dark reality is so apocalyptic that most people just ignore it. Public opinion surveys consistently show that while many say nuclear weapons are a danger, they don’t rank them as a major concern. Nuclear issues are nowhere to be found in Gallup’s polling of the most important problems facing the country. Those in authority rarely talk about nuclear war. The news media rarely mention it. Attention to the issue has been confined to a cadre of professionals—government officials, college professors, think tank specialists, and nuclear lab employees—who think, write, and talk in such abstract language that the horrors of nuclear destruction are obscured or minimized.

The danger not only remains, it is increasing. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump—whose countries together hold nearly 90 percent of global nuclear stockpiles—wake up every morning with the authority to wipe out entire cities. The United States has embarked on a trillion-dollar modernization of its aging nuclear arsenal; Russia is replacing all its Soviet-era nuclear systems and adding new ones. The theory—really a kind of belief system—underpinning this buildup is known as “nuclear deterrence.” It dictates that each country threatens the other with annihilation, thereby instilling such fear that neither uses the awful power they possess.

The horrible precariousness of this situation is compounded by the fact that over the past twenty-five years, with barely a political ripple, the treaties limiting the size and deployment of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals have lapsed or been abandoned. This began in 2002, when President George W. Bush, influenced by advocates for a nationwide missile defense system, pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed in 1972. It continued in 2019, when Trump withdrew the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which had eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, and this year, again under Trump, with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which since 2011 had provided for on-site inspections and limited the number of US and Russian nuclear warheads and missiles.

Now there is nothing to restrain the US or Russia other than Trump’s or Putin’s personal assessment of national interest. China, meanwhile, has been accelerating its nuclear buildup. And nuclear war planners rely more and more on artificial intelligence, which automates the process and reduces the time for human judgment.

In 1945 a group of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project created the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Two years later they established the Doomsday Clock, which rates the world’s vulnerability to human-caused global catastrophe. The Bulletin uses the imagery of nuclear apocalypse—a countdown to midnight—to convey threats to humanity. This year the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, in consultation with its Board of Sponsors—which Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer helped create—set the clock at eighty-five seconds to midnight. This is the closest it has ever been.

Three recent books attempt to explain how we got into this mess. In The Nuclear Age, Serhii Plokhy, a historian at Harvard, provides a sweeping account of the science, politics, and history of nuclear technology. He begins with H.G. Wells, who coined the term “atomic bomb” in his novel The World Set Free (1914). Wells’s vision of a new weapon of immense power began to seem plausible in the 1930s, as scientists in different countries discovered that bombarding uranium with neutrons could produce a chain reaction—nuclear fission. In August 1939 Einstein and other prominent physicists signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to build an atomic bomb before the Germans did, which led to the Manhattan Project.

Oppenheimer directed the laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that designed the first atomic bombs. In 1946 he drafted a report that recommended the creation of an international authority to own and control all fissile and nuclear materials. Bernard Baruch, the US representative to the newly established United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, incorporated these ideas into a plan that he presented that same year at the UN. Among its provisions was a stipulation that the permanent members of the UN Security Council would not have veto power over decisions to punish nuclear violations. Joseph Stalin refused to agree to this. The Soviet Union countered with a demand that the US destroy its nuclear weapons before any international authority was created, but the distrust between the two countries made that impossible. The Soviet Union tested its own nuclear weapon in 1949, and other countries followed.

After Stalin died in 1953, relations between the US and the Soviet Union began to improve. In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev visited America, and talks were planned for a summit in Paris the following year. But just as the meeting was about to begin the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane that had been surveilling Soviet missile capacity. Khrushchev was outraged and asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower to apologize. When he didn’t, Khrushchev broke up the summit—and so began decades of missed opportunities.

In 1960 John F. Kennedy was elected president after a campaign in which he asserted that the US was falling behind the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race—the so-called missile gap—though he knew that U-2 surveillance had shown this to be false. Both Kennedy and Eisenhower approved the stationing of nuclear missiles in Turkey, though they privately expressed doubts about doing so. In response Khrushchev put Soviet missiles in Cuba, which resulted in the Cuban missile crisis. That near catastrophe led to the signing of the first formal nuclear arms treaty between the US and the Soviet Union in 1963, which banned above-ground and underwater testing of nuclear weapons. This inaugurated a series of arms agreements but did not prevent either country from building tens of thousands more.

Despite the Vietnam War, relations between the US and the USSR improved sufficiently for Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev to bring about a period of détente in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period American and Soviet negotiators conducted the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I), which led to an interim agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. These agreements imposed some limits on nuclear weapons and banned most antiballistic missile defense systems. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was remarkable in that it led both countries to accept their vulnerability.

The good feeling didn’t last long. In 1974 President Gerald Ford signed the Vladivostok Accord, paving the way for SALT II. Facing mounting criticism for being too soft on the Soviets, as well as competition from Ronald Reagan in his 1976 reelection bid, Ford appointed an outside group of hawkish experts to evaluate the CIA’s estimate of Soviet offensive capacity. Known as Team B, they delivered a report that emphasized hostile Soviet intentions and missile strength. It was later revealed to be grossly exaggerated, yet it was so alarming that the subsequent Carter administration launched a nuclear buildup, which accelerated in the 1980s under Reagan.²

Plokhy takes this story up to 2024 and the current war in Ukraine, in which Russia has targeted several nuclear power plants. He warns that the world’s approximately 440 nuclear power plants are now likely military targets. We are, he concludes, in “a more dangerous situation today than we have been since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.”

In Nuclear Weapons: An International History, David Holloway, a historian at Stanford, uses diaries and other previously confidential records to tell a chilling story of how the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons perceived—and misperceived—one another in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union and the US both believed that the other was determined to strike first.³ Each genuinely feared the other and recognized the horrors that a nuclear war would bring, yet that did not stop them from taking perilous risks on many occasions. “Neither Truman nor Stalin,” Holloway writes, “saw the bomb solely or even primarily as a common danger to be addressed by cooperative action.” That is a sentiment apparently shared today by Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping.

Distrust and competition were present from the technology’s earliest days. Holloway recounts how the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who visited the Manhattan Project, did his best to convince both Winston Churchill and Roosevelt to raise with Stalin the question of how to manage the unprecedented power of atomic energy. He foresaw the “fateful competition” that would result from keeping Stalin in the dark about the atomic bomb that America was getting ready to use on Japan. Bohr failed in this effort. Two weeks after the US bombing of Hiroshima, Stalin gave the order to create a Soviet bomb, an enormous scientific and industrial undertaking that involved hundreds of thousands of workers. The Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949. Less than two months later, President Harry S. Truman approved a request from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to increase the US nuclear stockpile—an endless cycle of action and reaction.

Instead of the proposed international body to control nuclear weapons technology, the deeply flawed concept of deterrence emerged. In 1946 the American military strategist Bernard Brodie gave the classic formulation: the US had to possess “in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind,” which meant by the end of the Eisenhower administration the ability to launch enough nuclear weapons to kill 600 million people. “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars,” Brodie wrote. “From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.”

In January 1950, five months after the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, Truman announced the development of the significantly more powerful hydrogen bomb. Three months later his national security staff produced a secret policy paper known as NSC-68, which described the Soviets as “animated by a new fanatic faith” and called for an enormous military buildup of conventional and nuclear forces to counter an implacable and expansionary foe. Together with the Korean War, this led to a huge increase in the US defense budget. In October 1950 Truman authorized a multibillion-dollar “expansion program” that bolstered or added nuclear facilities in Oak Ridge, Hanford, Savannah River, and several other places, with a total cost exceeding that of the Manhattan Project. Then, in January 1952, he approved a longer-term program to further expand US nuclear capacity to match an expected Soviet buildup. The Defense Department argued that the US needed a “greater advantage” over the Soviets, which Stalin was never going to accept—a formula for endless, futile escalation.

In 1962, when Kennedy found out that Khrushchev had stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba, he demanded that they be removed. Though the Joint Chiefs recommended an air strike to destroy the missiles, with an invasion of Cuba to follow, Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine instead. If he had chosen to invade, it seems likely that other nuclear weapons on the island—unknown to the US—would have been launched, causing devastating American casualties. Thirty years later, Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, described the event as “horrifying…. There was a 99 percent probability that nuclear war would have been initiated.”

After Kennedy agreed not to invade Cuba and—secretly—to pull US missiles out of Turkey, Khrushchev removed the Cuban missiles, and the US and the Soviet Union set up a hotline for direct communication. But there immediately followed a huge buildup of nuclear weapons by both countries, which continued until Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to remove certain missiles from Europe, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the cold war ended. This is where Holloway ends his story, but the nuclear saga he describes continues as Russia, the US, and now China build and modernize deadly nuclear weapons that each hopes will keep the others in check.

Finally, in Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope, we get a bracing moral perspective from the voluminous private notes and writings of Daniel Ellsberg, as compiled by his son Michael Ellsberg and his longtime assistant Jan Thomas. Although better known for leaking the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was one of the “whiz kids” in the national security world of the 1950s and 1960s and worked directly with the principal architects of US nuclear policy. At the Pentagon, Ellsberg, with his top-level security clearance, had access to America’s nuclear attack plans.

In his book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017), he recounts first seeing an Eisenhower administration document called SIOP-62 in the spring of 1961, soon after his thirtieth birthday. It envisioned, in the event of war, launching as many as 3,200 nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union, China, and the other communist countries. Without even fully accounting for radioactive fallout, the expected death toll was in the hundreds of millions. From that day forward, Ellsberg tells us, he “had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of any such plan.”

His writings give a window into the thinking of a man who faced the insanity of nuclear weapons without flinching. On nuclear deterrence and its inherent threat of annihilation, Ellsberg writes, “Merely as risk-taking it has been an unbearably reckless, evil gamble.” By comparison, Brad Roberts, President Barack Obama’s policy director for the Nuclear Posture Review, wrote, “Part of the answer is to update the menu of potential options for reducing risk in light of the risk net assessment framework described above.” Ellsberg counters, “Any nuclear plan is a plan for madness. I am living in a society that is preparing a catastrophe. I taste ashes in the wind.”

Truth and Consequence offers a glimpse of Ellsberg’s courageous and eventful life—how his mother forced him to practice the piano for endless hours because she wanted him to be a concert pianist, how she and his sister died in an automobile crash that he and his father survived, his service in the Marine Corps, his loyalty to America and the president, and his realization that the Vietnam War was wrong and American nuclear policies deranged. In these pages we learn why an insider exposed to shocking secrets at the heart of US policy left government service to become a lifelong activist and risked life in prison to reveal official lies and deception.

“Why did I never hear anyone raise the question, ‘Is this right?’” Ellsberg wonders. “Why were ethical or moral principles never mentioned? The only questions raised were: Will this work? Is it expedient? Is it worth the risk? Will we get away with it?” He adds:

For 25 years I have been trying to understand, so as to prevent, a catastrophe: nuclear war.

How could this possibility have been permitted? The very possibility of murder on this scale, which seems unmistakably real, is a mystery that I am trying to investigate: a mass murder mystery.

These warnings have gone unheeded. In 2023 the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States—a twelve-member bipartisan panel of national security experts—fully endorsed the nuclear modernization program, now estimated to cost at least $1.7 trillion, and called for an even bigger buildup. This includes more of everything: B-21 bombers and tanker aircraft, long-range air-launched cruise missiles, Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads, Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, a new “theater” nuclear delivery system for deployment to Asia and Europe, and much else.

In addition to taking up many of these proposals, Congress is now considering Trump’s Golden Dome, a trillion-dollar scheme to place an ineffective missile defense “shield” over the entire country. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that to destroy just ten incoming ballistic missiles would cost $720 billion. The idea that the Golden Dome could reliably knock out hundreds, even thousands of missiles is preposterous. But the existence of an American nuclear shield, however flawed, would be perceived by Russia as part of a US plan to attack with impunity. This would dramatically increase tension between Russia and the US and reduce, not increase, American security. Russia’s stockpile of more than five thousand warheads matches America’s, and Russia is now building systems that could penetrate whatever nuclear defenses the US constructs.⁴

China’s own buildup makes this an unprecedented three-way competition. Already, according to Pentagon estimates, it has doubled its nuclear arsenal from three hundred warheads in 2020 to more than six hundred in 2025, with the goal to produce one thousand by 2030. This new dynamic of three competing powers makes nuclear restraint increasingly unlikely as each country attempts to match the others. Furthermore, six other countries have the bomb—Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—and are expanding their capacity. The unsettled wars in Ukraine and Iran add to the instability. Putin has made veiled nuclear threats, has launched nuclear-capable missiles, and is reportedly considering escalating the conflict against European nations that support Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump is threatening to resume nuclear testing for the first time since 1992.

Scientific knowledge and technology continue to advance. Our ability to reduce, much less eliminate, the nuclear threat has not. Our leaders are complacent or distracted with respect to the risks of nuclear horror. They are men driven by grievance and whim. The public is uninformed or else desensitized. The antinuclear movement that engaged millions in the 1980s does not exist today. The cycle of distrust and competition intensifies.

Ellsberg died in June 2023. A few months before, he and I spent several hours talking at his home in Kensington, California, a small community not far from San Francisco. Despite his terminal cancer diagnosis, he was cheerful and at peace. He reflected on his life’s effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons and bluntly acknowledged his failure. Then, without a trace of irony or exaggeration, he compared our current course to that of the Titanic, speeding through the dark despite numerous ice warnings. His message was clear: we are not merely drifting toward Armageddon, we are racing there.