Since the end of the Cold War, the world has lived with the threat of nuclear conflagration. The world’s nine nuclear powers are capable of ending all life on Earth. In Russia and the US, the power to launch apocalyptic weapons rests in the hands of one person. This has been true for decades, but for too long, the public has safely ignored the threat. Something has changed though, and people have learned to fear them again.

I’ve been covering nuclear weapons for a decade now, and I’ve seen it go from a niche curiosity to a major news beat in the last two years. Something has changed in 2024. The number of nuclear stories and public interest in nuclear weapons has changed.

Whenever Vladimir Putin makes a vague threat, a cascade of stories hit the newswires. Every report to Congress on the progress of the Chinese nuclear arsenal TODAY got national press coverage. Three weeks ago, 60 Minutes cut a bunch of its nuclear coverage from the past decade and released it as long video on YouTube. The New York Times has spent the past year publishing spectacularly 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 wasteland.

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

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

Last year, Oppenheimer tells the story of the birth of nuclear weapons. A few months later, it was released by Amazon Fallout, a nihilistic and absurd journey through a nuclear disaster in California. Both were huge hits.

Korda also focused on the election, especially between Biden and Trump. “They are both very old. Both parties champion the trivial claim that the other candidate is historically dangerous for the country. There are signs of deterioration on both sides,” he said.

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

When Biden left office, he was 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 survey about the sole authority of the President to launch a nuclear weapon. The Times asked all 530 prospective members of Congress how they felt about the President’s ability end all life on Earth. The responses represent an interesting cross-section of understanding an opinion.

Many are uncomfortable with the president launching nukes as a first strike but fine with the president launching nukes in retaliation for a strike. The democrats called Trump bad. Republicans point to Biden’s diminishing capacities. Others provide nuanced and complex answers about prevention, development, and sole authority. Many did not answer, and some gave yes or no answers, but those who answered in depth did so with consideration and thought.

It’s something they have in mind.

The nuclear threats were part of the first Trump administration, it was real. But the conversation about nukes is different now, and much worse. “What is frightening about the first Trump administration is the cavalier manner in which Mr. Trump has made nuclear threats, and mostly about North Korea. So you know, the fall of the Fire and the Fury in 2017 and then, of course, all the negotiations, which ultimately failed with Kim Jong Un in his leadership, “Sharon Squassoni, a veteran of the control of arms of Congress and research professor at George Washington University, told Gizmodo.

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

“The other thing that went along with that was the collapse of all these arms control agreements,” Squassoni said. For decades, a series of arms control agreements between the US and Russia have eased tensions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America even helped Russia dismantle its nuclear weapons and use nuclear material in its nuclear plants. It’s over.

During the first Trump administration, America withdrew from the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty stopped specific types of nukes in both countries with an intermediate range. A year ago, the US pulled of the Open Skies Treaty, which allows rival countries to openly survey each other to avoid misunderstandings. In 2023, Russia withdrew from a treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons.

The only remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the US and Russia is now the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). This Obama-era agreement limits the number of nuclear warheads both countries can possess. It will expire in 2026 unless both sides agree to renew it. But its implementation requires both sides to allow their opponents to inspect nuclear weapons sites. Putin has already said that he will not allow the treaty to be implemented and that it will likely 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 new intercontinental ballistic missiles. America is modernizing its forces and is set to spend billions of dollars on its own silos and ICBMs. Russia tested a new nuclear cruise missile and recently launched a new type of medium-range ballistic missiles in Ukraine in November.

“We are in a new nuclear arms race. It’s not just rhetoric,” Joseph Cirincione, a former Congressional staffer turned anti-nuclear proliferation watchdog, told Gizmodo. “There are multi-billion dollar programs underway in almost all nine nuclear armed nations. Most famous in the United States, Russia, and China.”

According to Cirincione, the US spends $70 billion annually on new nuclear weapons and an additional $30 billion on missile defense systems. That money has a tangible impact on the communities where it is spent. Nuclear weapons destroy reality in the places where they exist.

To build the new Sentinel-class ICBMs, the US will have to dig several new silos and build several underground structures in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and North Dakota. Different parts of this project will touch 23 different states. In the places where they built silos, the contractors building temporary cities to accommodate the influx of workers. General Dynamics, a contractor working on new nuclear submarines, visited schools to teach students how to work in the nuclear industry and teach them to build submarines in the future.

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

“I think nuclear weapons remain a unique place in American fears, in part because the main story that’s been taught about nuclear weapons is that we use them to end a war. The second story taught about nuclear weapons, that the US and Russia have enough to point at each other to end the world forever, meaning that if tensions flare up between the two states with the largest arsenal, IT it’s a short walk to think that nuclear oblivion is imminent,” Kelsey Atherton, Editor-in-Chief of the Center for International Policy told me.

“In a sense, Americans understand nukes as ending major wars, and forget all about them, and the popular coverage (especially on television) is terrible at putting nukes in context,” he said. said. “Which means if something shocking happens, like the use of IRBM in Ukraine, it will be filtered through the shallowest understanding of nuclear danger, paired with the apocalyptic video.”

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

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