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Commentary
Wall Street Journal

“Countdown” and “Nuclear War” Review: Apocalypse Deferred

The men and women who manage America’s nuclear arsenal have a delicate job. They must ensure weapons of catastrophic power are handled safely.

The United States detonates an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in Micronesia for the first underwater test of the device in 1946. (Wikimedia Commons)
Caption
The United States detonates an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll on July 1, 1946. (Wikimedia Commons)

Nuclear war is our version of the apocalypse—an end to civilization, to history, to life itself, brought about not by divine decree but by man-made folly. Fears of an all-out nuclear exchange haunted the early postwar years and notoriously intensified during the Cold War. Hollywood captured the angst and anxiety in, for example, “On the Beach,” “Fail-Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove.” With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end to the bipolar Cold War rivalry, it seemed for a while as if such fears could be put to rest.

No such luck. The need to “think the unthinkable” has returned with Vladimir Putin’s veiled threat to launch nuclear missiles if Russia feels alarmed by the West’s response to its invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, it is reported that Russia is thinking about putting nuclear weapons in space, while China is rapidly expanding its own nuclear arsenal. In the Middle East, there is an increasingly urgent concern that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and use it on behalf of its geopolitical designs.

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