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vladimir putin
Toward Dialogue and Survival in a Perilous Time
Common security lessons for the US and Russia in a world without arms control.
Jul 05, 2026
The following article was initially written at the request of Oleg Bodrov, a Russian physicist with commitments to peace and environmental sustainability and safety. I met Oleg about a decade ago during the World Conference against A- & H- Bombs in Hiroshima, and today we both serve on the board of the International Peace Bureau, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient organization. In addition to serving on IPB’s board, Oleg is chairman of the Public Council of the South Coast of the Gulf of Finland. He lives outside of St. Petersburg and does what he can given the limits of the possible in Putin’s Russia. When he and I last spoke, Ukrainian drones had devastated a massive Russian oil refinery, spewing toxins into the Baltic Sea and across many Russian communities. With Ukrainian drones flying overhead he hadn’t slept the previous night, making Oleg one more innocent caught in that mutually disastrous war.
In our exchanges, Oleg came up with a proposal to take a small step toward bridging the divisions of the new US-Russian Cold War and building for the time when the missiles, drones, and guns of the Ukraine War have been silenced. His idea: I should write an article that shared US peace movement thinking and named actions that can reduce the increasingly perilous military tensions and serve as foundations for a future era of US-NATO-Russian Common security. Oleg would translate the article and arrange for its publication in a Russian scientific journal. As we corresponded about the article’s publication, it occurred to us that it might also prove helpful for US readers, hence its publication here in Common Dreams. Where this will lead, only time will tell. But the truth is that both the US and Russia are going to be around for a long time, and a just and peaceful Common Security order will be essential for this and future generations.
Most Dangerous Moment Since the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock report warns us that we face Cuban Missile Crisis level danger. Back then, in 1962, senior officials in the Kennedy administration thought the odds of the missile crisis leading to a nuclear war were 50-50. In the aftermath of the eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation, Daniel Ellsberg, a senior Kennedy nuclear adviser, became so pessimistic about humanity’s future that, not expecting to live to an old age, he ceased paying into his pension fund.
But both President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, along with their ruling circles, were sufficiently sobered by the specter of nuclear annihilation. They moved quickly to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Their successors built on this foundation, constructing the six-decade-old arms control regime. They negotiated treaties from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to the SALT and START agreements. They limited, but failed to erase, the dangers of nuclear annihilation.
The Collapse of the Arms Control Architecture
That arms control regime is now history. First came the loss of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty almost 25 years ago. Then came the expiration of the New START Treaty. Now, President Donald Trump is obsessed with resuming nuclear-weapons testing, and both the US and Russia are moving to deploy new nuclear-capable missile systems.
Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal.
Adding to nuclear dangers, Beijing is increasing its nuclear arsenal in pursuit of parity with Moscow and Washington. We are becoming three nuclear-armed scorpions in a bottle. This, together with Russian concerns about the French and British nuclear arsenals, complicates any possible future arms reduction diplomacy. The inability of the US, Russia, and China to find common ground—or even to agree on a least common denominator consensus document—was a major factor that dictated the third consecutive failure of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference this past May.
The geopolitical landscape is further complicated by the US-Israeli-Iran war. During that conflict, President Trump speculated about possible low-yield nuclear attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Predictably, more and more nations are learning a lesson from North Korea: Great powers will not attack you if you have a nuclear arsenal. Political pressures for nuclear-weapons proliferation are therefore building in threshold nations from Seoul to Stockholm, including Iran, Poland, and Japan, among others.
“Human Beings and Nuclear Weapons Cannot Coexist”
Political realism and the survival of our species point in two complementary directions. As the Japanese A-bomb survivors and their organization Nihon Hidankyo (awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize) warn, it should be obvious: “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
We have already had too many close calls with extinction: false nuclear alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and geopolitical miscalculations. And as Nobel Peace Laureate Joseph Rotblat, the founder of the Pugwash Conferences and the only senior Manhattan Project scientist to quit for reasons of conscience, explained, humanity faces a stark choice. We can either completely eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, or we will see their proliferation and eventual use. Why? Because no nation will long tolerate what it perceives as an unjust and threatening imbalance of power—in this case, the imbalance of nuclear terror.
Even in the best of circumstances, it will take valuable time—possibly more time than we have—to build the trust and to conduct the negotiations needed for a nuclear-weapon-free world. This, in turn, forces us to learn another lesson from US-Russian history: the possibility of Common Security. In crisis, as our Chinese friends remind us, there is opportunity as well as danger.
The Lesson of Common Security and the Palme Commission
In the 1980s humanity faced a similar situation. The two great powers flirted with triggering a catastrophic war that could have caused a nuclear winter. The US and the Soviet Union brought the world to the nuclear brink with the planned deployments of SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II missiles.
The combination of popular movements calling for a halt to the nuclear arms race, and President Mikhail Gorbachev’s understanding that military spending had to be reduced if the Soviet economy were to be salvaged, led Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme to convene the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Bush regime, great power relations reverted to the rules of the game among Mafia families.
Georgi Arbatov, the most senior military adviser to Gorbachev, later wrote about the commission’s work and its world-changing recommendations. In meetings with former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and leaders from Austria, Germany, Norway, India, and elsewhere, “a new approach to nuclear arms emerged.” Its essence, in Arbatov’s words, was that “we cannot guarantee our own security at the expense or detriment of someone else’s, but only on the basis of mutual interests.”
To reverse the spiraling arms race, each side needed to name the other’s actions that were most threatening to it and then negotiate agreements that would remove those threats without weakening anyone’s security. Those difficult negotiations led in 1987 to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibited the SS-20, cruise, and Pershing II deployments, and functionally ended the Cold War two years before the Berlin Wall fell.
Defining the Contexts of Today’s Crisis
Context is almost everything. Reflecting on the failure of the 2026 NPT Review Conference, Vietnamese Ambassador Do Hung Viet, the conference president, commented that it is a “fair judgment” to conclude that the US-Iran impasse, which “hung over our heads from the beginning,” together with the Ukraine War and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, made consensus impossible. “Political concerns,” he said—including the race for artificial intelligence supremacy—“were overwhelming.”
As generations succeed one another, knowledge and wisdom are inevitably lost as well as gained. After two calamitous world wars that claimed between 75 and 97 million lives, the surviving great powers sought “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” They attempted to do so while simultaneously securing their imperial powers and privileges. Thus Article 1 of the United Nations Charter committed governments “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace…”
For the most part, this first commitment was honored—with significant exceptions in Indochina, Afghanistan, and interventions in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Bush regime, great power relations reverted to the rules of the game among Mafia families. Drunk with arrogance, the US Bush government boasted: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities… We’re history’s actors.”
Washington’s arrogance of power continued into the 1990s with the Bill Clinton Administration. Rather than respect Russian history, political culture, sensitivities, and ordinary Russians’ need for economic security, Clinton and his mandarins imposed another cataclysmic revolutionary change: neoliberal economic shock therapy. The result was massive dislocation, impoverishment, a rising death rate, and the restoration of an authoritarian government in Moscow.
Russia’s political and economic systems imploded during Boris Yeltsin’s rule. Despite George Kennan’s warning—Kennan was the architect of Cold War containment—that NATO expansion would lead to disastrous conflict; President Clinton did exactly that in 1999. He initiated NATO enlargement, bringing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance. As “history’s actors,” Bush II added seven Central and Eastern European nations to NATO in 2004. Then, in 2008, against the advice of his senior adviser Fiona Hill and over the opposition of Germany and France, Bush the Lesser forced an invitation to Ukraine and Georgia through NATO’s summit.
Given Russia’s memories of invasions from the west—Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler—the Kremlin responded as Kennan and Hill had predicted. In an obvious breach of the UN Charter, the ostensibly defensive Russian invasion of Georgia followed. Meanwhile, even without Kiev becoming a formal NATO member, and in response to the alliance’s expanding military presence in Ukraine, President Putin reportedly began planning what became the disastrous “special military operation” as early as 2007. Even before, among the earliest and most egregious Bush-Cheney acts was the withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, then a cornerstone of arms control.
The little remaining mutual trust between the West and Russia was among the first casualties of the war. The war also spurred further NATO expansion, with Finland and Sweden joining the alliance and thus doubling the line of contact between NATO and Russia. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian casualties, US-Russian arms control agreements, including New START and Open Skies, became collateral damage. The new Cold War became even more dangerous as the US military-industrial complex and the Kremlin pressed to “modernize” their nuclear forces, and as European nations—fearing what Russian territorial ambitions might become—laid the foundations for a new European military superpower.
Nuclear Threats and the Arms Race
There is a mistaken but widespread belief that nuclear weapons have not been used since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This is wrong. As Daniel Ellsberg later wrote, during international crises and wars, US presidents have prepared to initiate nuclear war and have threatened to do so. They have done so in the same way that an armed robber points his gun at his victim’s head: Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used. Not only during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but repeatedly during wars and interventions in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, the Taiwan Strait, and other crises, the United States has resorted to nuclear extortion. As former US Defense Secretary Harold Brown put it, with the US first-strike capacity and doctrine in place, our conventional forces become “meaningful instruments of military and political power.”
Noam Chomsky put it differently: “That means that under this umbrella of strategic nuclear weapons… we have succeeded in sufficiently intimidating anyone who might help protect people we are determined to attack.”
Although current geopolitical and technological landscapes are very different from those at the height of the first Cold War, we are not without diplomatic structures and models that can serve as foundations for trust-building dialogue and negotiations.
The United States is not the only nuclear power that has practiced nuclear blackmail. Every other nuclear-weapons state has done so at least once. As early as 1956, Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin threatened London and Paris, hoping that the threat would force their withdrawal from Egypt during the Suez War. More recently, and to considerable effect, President Putin and former President and current Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev have engaged in nuclear saber-rattling.
Nuclear powers seek to legitimize their arsenals and “modernization” on the basis of deterrence theory—the idea that each new development is necessitated by the need to prevent a nuclear attack by a rival. In reality, the George H.W. Bush administration’s initial “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” gave the game away. As that document stated, “The focus of US deterrence efforts is… to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US national interests” The same applies to all other nuclear-weapons states. And as the history of false alerts, mistaken launch orders, accidents, and ill-conceived aggressions demonstrates, deterrence only works—until it doesn’t.
Even before the New START Treaty’s limit of 1,550 deployed strategic missiles expired, Washington and Moscow were arms racing. The US is spending $1.7 trillion to “modernize” and replace its entire nuclear triad—including its “use-them-or-lose-them” first-strike land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—and is racing to renew warhead pit production.
Seeking to maintain parity, Russia is also developing and moving to deploy a range of new strategic-range weapons. These include a hypersonic boost-glide vehicle carried by the Sarmat “super-heavy” ICBM; an air-launched hypersonic ballistic missile capable of evasive maneuvers; a nuclear-powered cruise missile of “unlimited range”; a nuclear-powered unmanned underwater vehicle of “unlimited range”; and a sea-launched hypersonic missile.
President Trump, committed to regaining nuclear and high-tech superiority and to prevailing in the artificial intelligence competition with China, also seeks to spend trillions of dollars on his “Golden Dome” missile defense system. It will never work, but it will be profoundly destabilizing and will bankrupt the United States.
Making matters still more dangerous, US-Russian military-to-military communications are at their nadir. Moscow has made clear that it is disinterested in renewed risk reduction and arms control diplomacy until it is satisfied with the outcome of the Ukraine War.
What Is to Be Done?
Rebuilding trust is essential for any risk and arms reductions, but it will require patience and steadfast commitments on all sides. It seems clear that negotiating a new European security system will only become possible when the post-Ukraine War dust settles over the European strategic landscape. Similarly, greater clarity about Washington’s commitment to NATO, and about the credibility of massive European rearmament, will be critically important factors in approaching any new risk-reduction and strategic-stability negotiations.
In approaching the urgent need to restore stability to US-Russian-European relations, we should reflect on the differences between Western and Chinese approaches to arms control diplomacy. We can learn from the Chinese.
The Western approach has been an exclusive focus on negotiations about particular nuclear-weapons systems and doctrines. Chinese diplomats and leaders, on the other hand, wisely think it necessary to identify and address the underlying causes that drive nuclear arms races and potential conflict.
Given that there is no military solution to the Ukraine War, it is past time for a ceasefire, for compromises, and for multidimensional peace negotiations—Ukraine-Russia, EU-Russia, US-Russia. Only then can we begin to address the existential US-Russian nuclear risks with Common Security diplomacy.
Although current geopolitical and technological landscapes are very different from those at the height of the first Cold War, we are not without diplomatic structures and models that can serve as foundations for trust-building dialogue and negotiations.
Resources for Rebuilding Trust
Among these resources is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). A post-Ukraine War 21st-century version of that conference could be a constructive way to begin building a new Common Security order. Although its 57 European, North American, and Asian member states have reduced their financial and other commitments to the OSCE—which is mandated to work for stability, peace, and democracy in Europe—it can still serve as a neutral forum for diplomatic engagement and negotiations for a new Eurasian and Euro-Atlantic order.
The OSCE grew out of the 1973 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), “a multilateral forum for dialogue and negotiation between East and West.” Among its initiatives was the Helsinki Process, involving 35 nations that agreed to the inviolability of post-World War II frontiers, reinforced commitments to human rights, and facilitated the institutionalization of the OSCE.
Track II and other discussions among Europeans, Russians, and Americans have continued despite the war, and they have identified numerous traditional paths to nuclear risk reduction and arms control possibilities. A laundry list of sometimes competing proposals has been developed and can be drawn on when the time is ripe.
We can create visions and policies that reduce the growing nuclear danger and lead to arms control, common security, and nuclear disarmament.
Alexey Arbatov, of the Center for International Security at the Primakov Institute in Moscow, identified two conditions essential for arms control diplomacy during the Cold War: “a state of mutual nuclear deterrence” and “the emergence of approximate equality (parity) of strategic forces” of the dominant nuclear powers. A new conceptual approach, he argues, requires acknowledging the realities of multilateral deterrence, incorporating the security interests of all nuclear-armed states, and rebuilding strategic stability through inclusive frameworks rather than bilateral bargains. Chinese, French, and British nuclear arsenals, plus the nuclear four outside the NPT regime, must be factored into any negotiations. We are thus challenged by at least a four-dimensional diplomatic puzzle, and finding a solution is an urgent necessity.
There is a third requirement without which there can be no exit from a bellicose and mutually debilitating future: trust. It can only be developed over time, through patient confidence-building measures. These could include continuing to honor New START deployment limits and refraining from uploading additional warheads onto existing missiles. Wolfgang Richter, a former German colonel now associated with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, writes that overcoming the current vicious circle of distrust requires “renewed and credible mutual commitment confirming that the independence and territorial integrity of states will be respected.” This could be achieved by a settlement of the Russia-Ukraine War and by trust-building initiatives between Russia and its European neighbors.
Even before the Ukraine War ends and opens the way for risk reduction and arms control negotiations, many on both sides of the US-Russia divide agree that the first priority must be preventing a resumption of nuclear-weapons testing, which President Trump has threatened. Related, and possibly of equal importance, is to honor and sustain the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the wake of the recent failed review conference.
Another limited but encouraging proposal is to convene a US-Russia-China leadership summit, at which a version of the Reagan-Gorbachev warning—that nuclear war can never be won and must not be fought—is reiterated. This would open the way for officials and experts to explore jointly how to reduce nuclear risk.
Unhinged and dangerous as he is, we need to acknowledge that despite his recent nuclear threat to Iran, over the years Trump has been willing to talk with Russia, and he has repeatedly stated that he wants movement toward denuclearization. Not that he has done much to make that happen.
Given the political environment in most European countries, and with Germany and France now competing for European military leadership as confidence in NATO wanes, initiatives for risk reduction and greater strategic stability inevitably lie with Washington and Moscow. If progress can be made by the US and Russia, Europeans could then be brought in.
Military-to-military communication needs to be revitalized, perhaps beginning with crisis communications, especially as drone warfare and wayward Ukrainian and Russian drones increase the danger of miscalculation. Building on the tradition of the Vienna Document, communication could then be expanded regarding troop movements, military exercises, and more. Addressing the growing military competition for control of the Arctic could be one place to begin.
Even though Russia and the United States have functionally withdrawn from the Open Skies verification treaty, 32 member states continue to honor it. A return to Russian and US participation would be a comparatively easy means to signal intentions to improve relations, and an important step toward trust building.
Like cultural exchanges in the past, trust can be built in many ways by renewing cooperative commitments. Low-hanging fruit could include building on the decades-long International Space Station collaboration; renewed scientific cooperation across the Arctic, where thawing permafrost poses increasing climate and health dangers; and, always, people-to-people exchanges.
Magic wands are in short supply. As the biblical proverb advises, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Across the lines and structures that divide us, like the Hibakusha and the men and women who preserved human survival through the worst of the Cold War, we can create visions and policies that reduce the growing nuclear danger and lead to arms control, common security, and nuclear disarmament. Naming, dialogue, and debate are essential building blocks to get there.
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The 3 Phases of Trump's Quagmire in Iran
Trump’s defenders argue that his contradictory actions are strategic. It’s more likely that panic has him flailing. His gut instinct led him to make a colossal mistake, and he has no idea what to do next.
Mar 30, 2026
President Donald Trump launched the Iran war based on his “gut instinct.” Global financial markets—the North Star that guides Trump—are telling him what his advisers and congressional Republicans won’t: His “gut” blew it badly, and his efforts to appease the markets are making the debacle worse.
He has proceeded in three phases. We’re now at the Trump panic phase.
Phase No. 1: Trump’s Gut Was Wrong and the Markets Scolded Him
Trump ignored the facts and relied on gut instinct to launch the war without making the case to America’s allies or the public:
We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first.
Trump’s baseless opinion contradicted the justification for war that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had provided to Congress a day earlier. Rubio said that Israel was going to attack and that Iran would retaliate by attacking US interests in the region.
Even worse, Trump ignored long-predicted consequences:
- Iran attacked neighboring countries aligned with the United States;
- It closed the Strait of Hormuz to the US and its allies, disrupting one-fifth of the world’s oil supply;
- The global price of oil surged from $72 per barrel to more than $100 per barrel;
- Because Iran’s major source of revenue is oil—accounting for 35% of its federal budget—Trump funded the enemy’s war chest; and
- Global financial markets plummeted.
Phase No. 2: Trump’s First Effort to Calm Markets Helped Putin
Trump’s initial assurance that the war would be over in “four to six weeks” offered the markets only sporadic and temporary relief. So he started down the slippery slope of eliminating longstanding sanctions on Russian oil.
Oil and natural gas are Russia’s most important sources of revenue, accounting for 30% to 50% of the federal budget. Sanctions had forced Russia to charge India $22 per barrel in January, putting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s economy on an unsustainable path. But on March 5, Trump issued a 30-day waiver allowing India’s purchases from Russia.
Trump’s waiver was a boon to Putin, but the global price of oil kept rising and the markets kept falling.
Phase No. 3: Trump Panicked and Made Matters Worse
On March 11, Trump released 172 million barrels from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve—the world’s largest supply source of emergency crude oil. But the oil would not make a dent in the global market, would take 120 days to deliver, and would leave the Strategic Reserve at its lowest level since 1982.
The price of oil kept rising, and the markets kept falling.
On March 13, over the objections of the European Union, Trump removed sanctions on Russian oil that was already at sea. It was another gift to Putin, but the price of oil kept rising and the markets kept falling.
On March 20, Trump lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian oil “currently stranded at sea.” In addition to providing Iran with $14 billion windfall, his action contradicted Trump’s contemporaneous claims that he had “won” the war and was considering “winding it down.”
As Brett Erickson, managing principal at a firm that specializes in financial crime and regulatory issues, observed: “You don’t unsanction Iranian oil if you’re winding down. This is the action of an administration that has no exit ramp and knows it. The word for that is desperation.”
Meanwhile, the price of oil kept rising, and the markets kept falling.
Trump’s panic became clear on Saturday, March 21, when he threatened to commit a war crime:
If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!
By Monday morning, the price of oil was skyrocketing and Asian and European markets were sinking. Shortly before the US stock market opened, Trump panicked again. He withdrew his threat and said that because the US and Iran had held “productive” talks, he was postponing the attack on Iranian’s energy infrastructure for five days.
The price of oil dropped more than 10%, and global markets soared. Meanwhile, it appeared that insiders with knowledge of Trump’s planned announcement made hundreds of millions of dollars in pre-announcement bets that crude oil prices would decline.
But then Iran’s foreign ministry denied Trump’s assertion about settlement talks, although through intermediaries the US and Iran had exchanged messages that “appeared to be short of negotiations.”
Within a day, the price of oil resumed its upward climb and the financial markets fell.
Panic begets panic. On March 26, Trump announced a 10-day extension to April 6 of his prior threat to commit a war crime by attacking Iran’s energy facilities. He asserted that settlement negotiations were proceeding while at the same time issuing contradictory statements about his war plans:
The Iranians “were begging for a deal,” but “they better get serious” and “talks were going very well.”
He wanted US allies to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, but didn’t care if they refused.
“We already won the war,” but Trump was massing more than 50,000 US troops in the region and threatened a ground assault on Iran’s main oil production facility.
He “may or may not” use the military to secure Iran’s uranium.
Trump’s defenders argue that his contradictory actions are strategic. It’s more likely that panic has him flailing. His gut instinct led him to make a colossal mistake, and he has no idea what to do next.
Worst of all for Trump: The financial markets are finally on to him.
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Scared of Nuclear War? Don't Panic, Organize!
We have to keep talking about, writing about, and organizing against nuclear weapons to prevent the Doomsday Clock from reaching midnight.
Feb 20, 2026
“I’m not scared, you’re scared!” is the repeated line in a children’s story we recently read to the kids at the Unitarian Universalist version of Sunday school I attend with my children. In that story, a scared bear and a brave rabbit, who (naturally!) are best friends, go on a hike together. Rabbit has to cajole and encourage Bear through every imaginable obstacle, but in the end (of course!) it’s Rabbit who gets stuck at the crucial moment and has to call on Bear for help. Bear (no surprise) sets aside his fears to rescue his friend and (tada!) finds new depths of bravery and adventurousness in the process.
After we read the story, the kids worked together to build paths from blocks and Legos through the imagined obstacles in the story—a bridge over a rushing river, a path through a dark forest, a staircase up a steep mountain. It was one of our most engaging classes in recent memory, while the kids kept saying, “I’m not scared, you’re scared!” and laughing while they played. As we stacked blocks and fit Legos together, we adults were supposed to help the kids identify things they were afraid of and how they could confront those fears. For me, it was just one thing too many. I blanked on that part of the assignment.
Yes, I’m Scared
In fact, I was a little relieved to have done so. Of course, I have fears myself, but I’m not afraid of spiders or heights or small spaces like so many people. I am afraid of nuclear war—not something I would want to confess to a bunch of kids sitting on carpet squares.
What should I have said? “Okay, kids, I know some of you are afraid of monsters or werewolves or the Wither Storm in Minecraft, but I’ll tell you something truly terrifying: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just moved its Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to ‘nuclear midnight,’ four seconds closer than ever before.” I would have gotten blank stares and quick subject changes and yet, once I had started, I would undoubtedly have kept on sharing the telltale heart of my own bogeyman. “When I was a kid in the 1980s,” I would have said, “we were at three minutes to metaphorical midnight and my dad, who was an activist, wouldn’t even let me go to the movies. Now, they have pushed it even closer—closer than ever before. With nine countries armed with nuclear weapons, we’ve tick-tocked ourselves to 85 seconds to midnight. Yep, 85 seconds, by the way, is probably less time than it takes you to spell your full name or tie your shoes.”
Trump’s famous wrecking ball that blasted the East Wing and the Kennedy Center is now aimed at the nuclear treaty architecture built up over the decades.
Of course, I kept those long-winded, fact-filled fears to myself at that Sunday school. But I’ll tell you all that, in truth, it’s far worse than even what I thought that day. The Bulletin‘s scientists who made the announcement about those 85 seconds to midnight were contending with more than nuclear dangers (which have, by the way, never been more imminent). Those scientists were also responding to the speeding up of catastrophic climate change and the threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI). In the words of Daniel Holz on the Bulletin‘s Science and Security Board, “The dangerous trends in nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies like AI, and biosecurity are accompanied by another frightening development: the rise of nationalistic autocracies in countries around the world. Our greatest challenges require international trust and cooperation, and a world splintering into ‘us versus them’ will leave all of humanity more vulnerable.”
Yes, all of humanity is vulnerable indeed—like my young friends building Lego bridges across felt rivers for a Bear and a Rabbit birthed in late night comedian Seth Meyers’s imagination.
The End of Arms Control as We Knew It
And as if all of that weren’t terrifying enough, Thursday, February 5 marked the end of arms control as we’ve known it. The last treaty controlling nuclear weapons between my country and Russia expired without a replacement on that day, leaving us all vulnerable to the whims of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. There are reports of a handshake deal between the two countries to extend the principles of the treaty, but haphazard and informal agreements are simply not “arms control” (at least as we once knew it).
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, was signed by US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010 and set out a schedule for verifiable and commensurate nuclear arsenal reductions. It was renewed under Republican and Democratic administrations, but it is very “on brand” for strongmen Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to deride international treaties of any sort.
Unfortunately, the sort of muscular bombast they’re known for isn’t what’s kept the world reasonably safe from nuclear war for the last eight decades, since the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Rather, it was a tight web of treaties—the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, START I and II, New START, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—that kept the whole world safe (or as safe as we could be with ever more nuclear-armed powers proliferating across the planet). That alphabet soup of promises, schedules, and commensurate acts of disarmament, as fragile and incremental as it was, resulted in the dismantlement of 80% of the US and Russian arsenals over the decades.
Now, we are all being dragged in the other direction.
Trump’s famous wrecking ball that blasted the East Wing and the Kennedy Center is now aimed at the nuclear treaty architecture built up over the decades. In its place, he proposes to construct a Golden Dome missile defense system to protect the United States from incoming nuclear weapons. And that fool’s errand could not only lead us toward nuclear war, but have a price tag in the trillions of dollars.
I Don’t Feel Fine
With his administration’s gold-plated, AI-enhanced sense of aggression, President Trump is now taking aim at NATO, an alliance the United States helped to build after World War II. His administration is abrogating agreements, leveling tariffs, and threatening to annex Greenland. Europe is getting the message that the United States is no longer a reliable ally, stoking concerns that yet more countries will move to create nuclear arsenals. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is investing more money in nuclear weapons and the Russian strongman has actually threatened to use such weapons, while already at war in a part of Europe.
Of course, Russia and the United States are anything but the only nuclear states these days. China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea round out the rogue’s gallery of—to come up with a word of my own—Obliterables.
In 2024 alone, those nine nuclear-armed states spent more than $100 billion on such weaponry, an 11% increase over the year before, according to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). For example, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ Nuclear Notebook finds that China is rapidly and aggressively increasing its nuclear arsenal. Beijing, it points out, has “significantly expanded its ongoing nuclear modernization program by fielding more types and greater numbers of nuclear weapons than ever before.”
Throughout Asia and Europe, the leaders of all too many countries are openly discussing regional pacts and the need to develop their own nuclear weapons programs. They are reviving the moribund logic of proliferators—that only more nuclear weapons can protect us against nuclear weapons. And that is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw in this already endangered world of ours.
Another Treaty to the Rescue?
Instead of all this unilateralism and nuclear proliferation, nuclear and nuclear-adjacent nations should be signing on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It’s clear and smart, and its goals are achievable. In essence, it prohibits countries from developing, testing, producing, stockpiling, transferring, or threatening to use (no less actually using) nuclear weapons. And if that seems remarkably comprehensive, it actually goes further, prohibiting nations from allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits assisting, encouraging, or forcing any other country to engage in any of these activities.
Thursday, January 22 marked five years since that treaty entered into force as international law and was adopted by a significant majority of the countries on this planet. On that day, I joined a handful of people gathered at the General Dynamics complex in New London, Connecticut (where I live). We celebrated the 74 nations that have ratified the treaty and the 25 more that have signed it and are in the process of ratifying it. My country, the United States, of course, stands outside of the global consensus on nuclear disarmament.
Panic and Fear, Fear and Panic
That same week after the Doomsday Clock moved four seconds closer to midnight, I wrote an essay for my local paper in New London. In less than 800 words, I tried to describe the massive nexus of decisions and dangers that went along with that four-second nudge closer to a metaphorical midnight for us all.
I shared my essay with my 11-year-old daughter Madeline while we sat in the bleachers at a local pool, watching her older brother swim with his swim team. She’s a wise little sixth grader who regularly pays attention when I least expect it. “Look what I did, Madeline,” I said, and showed her a screenshot of my article on my phone. The title was “Closing in on Nuclear Midnight; There’s Still Time to Disarm.” And then I explained to her that it was focused on how the Doomsday Clock had just moved closer to midnight.
“Oh,” she said, “I had a full-blown anxiety attack last week because Joanna told me that the flu shot wasn’t going to work.” Joanna is a seventh-grade friend of hers whose words carry a lot of weight.
I can all too easily spin out into an anxiety attack if I don’t continue to anchor myself to that little speech I made to Madeline, reminding myself of the real work people are doing to make this world a more bearable place.
I struggled to make the connection between that and what I had just shown her. Madeline added flatly, “A whole day of actual anxiety because of that news.”
“You’re going to be fine,” I said, far too quickly. “You’re healthy and, even if you get the flu, you’ll survive just fine.”
Then I slowed down. Of course, she was anxious. There was plenty to be anxious about in this Trumpian world of ours. Masked men in the streets, pulling some people out of cars through broken windows and shooting others in broad daylight. Tear gas, blockades, and crying kids on the nightly news (which we still watch sometimes).
But her fear of a flu shot and the flu she might still get was the right-sized fear for a sixth grader. Flagrant fascism, paramilitary violence, naked racism: those are massive fears for the preteen mind, as large as her mother’s fixation on nuclear war.
I need to tread carefully here, I thought, since panic and fear are contagious and erode rationality. Panic and fear cause isolation and paranoia. And while no one should panic about nuclear weapons, I thought, there’s certainly plenty to be afraid of. So, I pulled her a little closer to me, while remembering a professor at Rutgers who estimated that even a regional nuclear war would have a staggering global impact.
As a group of authors wrote in Nature Food in 2022, “In a nuclear war, bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet.”
Such an upside-down atomic version of climate change would have a widespread impact on agriculture globally, leading to massive famines. They estimated that more than 2 billion people might die from a “limited” nuclear war between long-time nuclear rivals India and Pakistan.
What Can You Do in 85 Seconds?
Brutal, right? I chose to keep that information to myself in the bleachers at that swimming pool. The flu shot, not global famine, I thought to myself. Stay right-sized in this conversation with her.
But my little girl moves fast and she makes connections—and she’s fascinated by time. She’s worn a watch forever and always wants to know how long something will take. (“When?” is her favorite question.) So, it was no surprise to me that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists clock fascinated her.
“85 seconds is not a long time, Mom. I mean, look,” and she made a quick little circle with her hand. “That’s like 85 seconds, so what does it mean that we’re 85 seconds to midnight?”
“Well,” I began, my voice suddenly breaking as I imagined the hellscapes of Hiroshima, those grim graphs in the Nature Food paper, and my daughter’s future.
“No, Mom,” she said. (She didn’t want my big emotions.) “Just tell me what happens when we get to midnight.”
“Well,” I began again, “if we hit midnight on their clock, that is the end of the world as we know it.”
“But that isn’t going to happen, right, Mom?” She replied with her usual firm confidence that I always admire and am invariably curious about, wondering where it comes from.
“It hasn’t happened yet, love,” was the best I could muster. “And the reason it hasn’t happened is that so many people all over the world all the time are resisting, pushing back, passing legislation, holding up signs, making documentaries, urging divestment from nuclear-related corporations, being creative and brave, calling for disarmament in every language we human beings speak.”
I’m stirred by my own rhetoric! “Nice!” I think to myself, but I can see her attention has slipped away.
I had, however, said the thing she needed to hear—that people are working to keep nuclear midnight from happening. She sees me working to do so, too. She sees me suiting up for another frigid session of sign holding at General Dynamics, the fourth largest weapons maker in this country with a huge complex in our neighborhood in Connecticut. She sees me coming home from a long organizing meeting. She knows I have some of the answers to the questions that her tidy brain can’t quite yet put into words. She thinks I’ve got things under control, so she snuggles closer to me and goes back to worrying about her friend’s flu shot warning, or where she left her library card and what she’s going to wear to school tomorrow that will be warm, cute, and not too matchy.
Of course, I don’t have it under control. I can all too easily spin out into an anxiety attack if I don’t continue to anchor myself to that little speech I made to Madeline, reminding myself of the real work people are doing to make this world a more bearable place.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is engaged in the steady work of adding nations to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, while continuing to build a global consensus for disarmament. Ira Helfand and the Back from the Brink network are working on public education, movement building, and the excruciating but important task of trying to get congressional legislation passed to prevent nuclear war. Leona Morgan and many other Indigenous activists are working to protect the environment, halt uranium mining, and win compensation for “downwinders” from what were once nuclear testing sites. Makoma Lekalakala and other international activists are mobilizing to oppose nuclear proliferation, resist the mining of uranium, and deal with other affronts to our world and health. Don’t Bank on the Bomb is leading the effort of individuals, organizations, and financial groups to divest from nuclear industries. And all of that work is indeed yielding dividends!
So, I refuse to let myself be scared. And so should you.
We have to keep talking about, writing about, and organizing against nuclear weapons—not at the expense of all the other work that so desperately needs to be done right now in this dread-inducing world of ours, but to preserve at least those 85 seconds for our children and grandchildren.
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