We Must Start Thinking Again about the Unthinkable

For those titillated by Strangelovian fantasies of nuclear apocalypse, the early 1980s were a golden age. That was the height of the Cold War, when nuclear arms and rhetoric escalated, and President Ronald Reagan envisioned a space-based anti-missile “shield”—promptly dubbed “Star Wars” by skeptics—that could thwart attacks by the “Evil Empire,” also known as the Soviet Union.

In 1983, I wrote my masters thesis on the nuclear freeze movement, which sought (in vain) to halt the arms race. After graduation I reported for IEEE Spectrum and then Scientific American on nuclear weapons, which also provoked widespread coverage in mainstream media. Everyone, it seemed, was “thinking about the unthinkable,” as the security scholar Herman Kahn famously described nuclear war.