Americans have had a long respite from thinking about nuclear war. The Cold War ended more than 30 years ago, when the Soviet Union was dismantled and replaced by the Russian Federation and more than a dozen other countries. China at the time was not yet a significant nuclear power. A North Korean bomb was purely a national threat. The fear of a large war in Europe escalating into a nuclear conflict faded from the public's mind.
Today, the Chinese nuclear arsenal could destroy most of the United States. The North Koreans have a stockpile of bombs. Dispatches And the Russian Federation, which inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal, has launched a major war against Ukraine. As the war began, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his nation’s nuclear forces to go on heightened alert and warned the West that any interference with the invasion would have “consequences that you have never experienced in your history.” Suddenly, the unthinkable seems possible again.
This story is from the July - August 2022 edition of The Atlantic.
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This story is from the July - August 2022 edition of The Atlantic.
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