The year is 2030, and humanity has gone extinct. The war between Russia and Ukraine had yet to see peace made or a victor emerge late into the 2020s, and Ukraine had become desperate. An AI forecasting metric predicted combined war casualties to reach 2 million by the Spring of 2026, a number unforeseen at the beginning of the conflict. With no signs of Russian withdrawal and all negotiation-based solutions having failed, the Ukrainian government was faced with a moral dilemma: continue an indefinite brutal conflict or employ a WWII-style display of sacrifice as the only means of long-term salvation.

As a current member of a variety of anti-nuclear and disarmament global organizations like the NPT, PTBT, CTBT, and START I, Ukraine’s announcement of a nuclear threat to Russia should they not back down came as a major surprise and disbelief to both Russia and the global audience. Quick to back their threat, Ukraine reminded the public of the Soviet collapse in 1991, which transferred the third-largest nuclear arsenal into Ukraine’s hands. Due to the following 10 years being characterized by public mass disarmament, the Minsk Treaty returning much of the arsenal to newly established Russia, and the resulting Trilateral Statement, under which Ukraine committed to eliminate all nuclear weapons on its territory and join the NPT in exchange for economic and security support, nuclear power was thought to be long gone from Ukraine. However, Russian military officials were well aware of the private International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigation into possible active nuclear weapons plants in Ukraine; the threat had to be taken seriously. Between the threat, the January 2023 IAEA investigation, and later October 2023 failure of Ukraine to vote in favor of the TPNW at a UN assembly, Russia decided to respond with its own threat of nuclear attack.

To dismantle any Ukrainian hope, Russia announced the prompt activation of its “Dead Hand” system. Long known as the Perimeter System, this Cold War-era nuclear annihilation strategy threatened the launch of the entire Russian nuclear arsenal in response to a nuclear attack–a serious deterrence measure, especially in its newly alleged hair-trigger state. With skepticism and threats of nuclear attack flying from both sides, the war continued.

Almost to match the atrocious war on the ground, an enormous storm in the Northern Hemisphere rolled in over the Russian territory. Continued lack of emissions control over the past 10 years had accelerated climate change and, as a result, increased the size and impact of weather phenomena like these. Featuring some of the tallest mountains in both the European and Asian continents, lightning discharge–an electrical breakdown current which may flow from cloud to ground–was not uncommon in these storms. The dominance of atmospherics generated by lightning in the ELF (extremely low frequency) and VLF (very low frequency) bands, however, posed a threat that would soon be known.

With the Perimeter System’s detonation command frequency falling within that of the ELF and VLF bands, it was inadvertently triggered! A launch of all intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarines, even amidst severe electromagnetic interference, ensued. With the generalized frequency creating whole-scale, irreversible detonation of Russia’s entire nuclear arsenal, anyone equipped with nuclear weapons, as per Russia’s knowledge, was targeted.

The US and China, specifically, were alerted by their defense technologies that they had under 30 minutes to respond to the “attack.” With no party having knowledge of the other’s motives–or lack thereof–a massive nuclear showdown took place in mere minutes. By the time the false harmony of ELF and VLF bands was discovered, the Earth was beyond repair. The death toll reached around 35 million in the first few hours, with another 58 million injured. The following nuclear winter killed more than 5 billion from starvation, and the density of the soot reduced global temperatures by more than 58ºF. Between the following infrastructure failure, starvation, and climate effects, the estimated 8.3 billion people inhabiting Earth, unable to recover, faced extinction.

In the arsenal of existential threats that put humanity on the precipice of extinction, nuclear warfare is arguably the most dangerous. While many countries attempt to shroud their nuclear developments in secrecy, publicly acknowledged hair-trigger destructiveness and morally manipulative power pose a blatant catastrophic risk should their use in a global conflict unfold. Why is it, then, that both governments and their peoples alike continue to avoid addressing this alarming conclusion? The answer lies in an underestimation of the weapons themselves and the discourse surrounding nuclear warfare, as well as our inability to perceive the degree of its threat to humanity. When reasoning, communication, and action are synergistically distorted by historical approaches and biased argumentation surrounding nuclear weapons, the existential crisis of nuclear warfare loses its impact. It becomes a fantastical disaster scenario that works to emotionally detach us from the catastrophic risk and the reality of the inevitable extinction path it would carve. To understand how our perception has become unconsciously twisted, we must first expose the rhetoric of nuclear weapons development and usage.

Nuclear weapons, their effects, and their usage alike have adopted a jargon that is the antithesis of their horrifying, destructive nature. In her article “Sex and Death in the World of Defense Intellectuals,” Carol Cohn recalls her experience working alongside military strategists and nuclear technicians. It was tradition to “pat the missile,” as “one does to babies, small children, [and] the pet dog.” These men displayed an intimate attachment toward their beloved artillery, treating it as if it had a life of its own, worth protecting. To further emphasize the “precious” and “innocent” nature of these destructive weapons, the U.S. Secretary of War of 1940-1945, Henry Stinson, “informed Winston Churchill [of a new bomb’s completion] by writing him a note that read, ‘babies satisfactory born’.” Thus, the love and life associated with a family (U.S.) having a child (Bomb) were ingrained into not just the military, but our political administrators as well. It did not take long for the original atom bombs’ names, like “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, to progress to the even more personal H-bomb with the name “Mike”–which Cohn remarks only further evidences the fact that “nuclear scientists [believed] they were giving birth to male progeny with the ultimate power of violent domination over female Nature.” Nuclear weapons of mass destruction became a race within themselves. The rhetoric that defined their existence gave them gender, class, and power just as one would a human. With this status, an unintentional emotional attachment was formed, and something that could kill millions in an instant was nothing more than an innocent, novel lifeform that deserved all the attention and care the U.S. could afford.

One would assume that even with their human-like descriptor, it would still be easy to acknowledge the catastrophic risks of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the proliferation of these technologies carved out their own corner of military power and put them on a God-like pedestal. They are confused representations of prestige and purifying power–concerningly similar to the totalitarian ideologies they were originally intended to defend against. We have masked the existential risk nuclear weapons pose by humanizing, even deifying, their existence so that people cannot properly grasp how truly atrocious a nuclear war would be.

Not only does our language mask the malevolent power of nuclear weapons, but the general inexperience of the human population with what a nuclear disaster truly looks like inhibits our ability to pursue disarmament. On a public Reddit forum, user ijustwannanap brings into question the public’s fascination with nuclear weapons: “the predominant reaction from the public towards nukes has always been one of breathless fascination, almost bordering on hysteria.” Since nuclear scenarios would likely spell doomsday across the globe, it is hard to picture and emotionally connect with the disaster. Individuals cannot fathom the predicted sadness and terror on the scale of nuclear destruction. Matt Rendall’s research on the psychology of nuclear disasters best explains the effect of this lack of experience as “the ‘availability’ heuristic, [where] people underestimate the risk of rare catastrophes.” Despite its infrequency, the unpredictability and inevitability of nuclear war make it a far more pressing concern, and the magnitude of predicted casualties threatens destruction of society as a whole.

In spite of this, ijustwannanap notes that “people seem to view it more as a game than an actual terrifying possibility,” with flashy symbols and televised interpretations of nuclear war only adding to its fantastical disguise. This struggle is outlined by the Center for Ethics Education at DePauw University, where the concept of “scope neglect” is evidenced in people’s struggle when “scaling up and down their judgments and responses to fit the size of a problem.” When the level of forecasted suffering becomes so great, it can have a short-circuiting effect on the brain that desensitizes us to processing reality. Despite nuclear war’s threat of extinction being arguably the most catastrophic and thus pressing concern, people remain biased toward short-term, “in-your-face-everyday” issues. Daily inconveniences mask the harsh reality that is the existential threat of nuclear destruction. Procrastinating action one more day, week, or year can come across as justifiable when the threat remains undated at the bottom of a to-do list. This very quality, however, is what makes nuclear war the most pressing and dangerous concern.

Even in light of catastrophe, the growth of nuclear arsenals has quickened, showing that people have bought into their value and power. This can be attributed to path dependence. In a Political Science Review at Harvard University, Paul Peirson argues that the common attribution of “‘large’ outcomes to ‘large’ causes” may instead “result from relatively ‘small’ or contingent events.” Nuclear war is an example of a large outcome generated by the incremental buildup of nuclear arms through deterrence-motivated path dependency. Despite not being employed by the great powers since WWII, and not being broadly used as a threat since the Cold War, development has become habitual. Pierson describes this concept as “‘naturalness,’ or functionality of observed outcomes,” where previous events influence our trajectory so much so that we do not question continuing down a similar path. A history of nuclear weapons use paints them as a general necessity, and despite major shifts in policy, military, and global politics, we continue to draw on historical records to justify our lock-in. While applicable in other existential cases like climate change–where historical records can be used to inform provable solutions–nuclear diplomacy has no clear cause/effect data. And just as their presence might prevent their use, there is no “proof” of such. Countries are, however, locked in a path-dependent loop of continuing to invest in a system that could just as easily create mass destruction as prevent it.

Path dependence is not only employed to justify the current linear approach to nuclear strategy, but it also inadvertently outlines a path toward future escalation. The nature of a positive feedback loop brings both reinforcement and amplification of one’s current state. Senior researcher at the Peace Center in Prague, Jan Ludvik, goes as far as to argue in his global policy research that “Russia continues to focus on deterring the United States,” forcing the “US strategies of counter-deterrence…to reassure allies and induce [further] caution in adversaries.” The evident build-up of nuclear technology thus becomes a cyclic, automatic response–but instead of returning to an equilibrium state of power, the competition to reinstate one’s dominance overwhelms.

Path dependency brings comfort to decision-making and action because of its intuitive, steady-state qualities. Our intuition, however, can be riddled with unconscious biases that do not advise a reason-based approach. Cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier’s research paper, “Why do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” provides evidence for human preference for defensibility over optimization. When we are without a collaborating body, decisions are made based on proactive reasoning. This proactive reasoning is employed to reinforce a preestablished strategy or viewpoint rather than an epistemic search for an alternative pathway/mindset. Blinded not by what is in front of us, but instead by what came before us, people tend to select for sameness. The sameness is mistaken for stability and masked as baseless optimism that, despite growing nuclear power and prevalence, we are all somehow going to be “A-Okay.”

Nuclear weapons have found a way to manipulate our mindset, masking their atrocity and rendering us stagnant in the face of our own demise. And because these obstacles to disarmament are so deeply interconnected with our human-ness, culture, and social constructs, they cannot easily be solved through policy-related mechanisms or quantifiable solutions. The humanization of nuclear arsenals lets their power dazzle us like some cinematic fantasy, and thus we become their puppets, locked into a self-confirming bias that they can do no wrong. But if this aspect of our social construction can hold so much sway over the people’s minds, then we must look to other social constructs to overpower them.

Nuclear weapons, their employment, and the methods by which they destroy could not be more opposite to living beings. While it is historically ingrained into our jargon to reference these weapons as we would a fellow person–or even worse–venerate their power, these benign euphemisms can be overcome through the proper characterization of the weapons themselves. This disentanglement starts through the establishment of Rule 71 of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which states that nuclear weapons “are by nature indiscriminate [and] cannot be directed at a military objective [and] effects cannot be limited as required.” Because of the massive scale of destruction, nuclear weapons lack the human ability to kill in a directed manner. And while a person doing the killing instead of a large bomb still raises moral questions, the destruction at the human scale is slow and compounding in nature, whereas the latter provides an immediate, inevitable, and irreversible danger to mankind. Similar reasoning allowed for the argument of “prohibition of certain types of mines and booby-traps in Amended Protocol II,” and thus should be used as logical guidance to progressively eliminate the association between conscious entities and those that are built upon their ability to render that very human power over life and death extinct.

From this viewpoint, nuclear weapons should be characterized as “anti-human.” Hans Morgenthau’s “Death in the Nuclear Age” explains this “anti-humanity” by claiming, “nuclear destruction destroys the meaning of death by depriving it of its individuality,” an individuality that man employs to “defend freedom and civilization.” By understanding that nuclear technologies are designed to operate without the emotional consciousness of a person, we can dissociate them from previously believed beings that “transfor[m] the meaning of our existence.” Rather, they are inanimate objects that ensure the mass destruction of our very humanity. These philosophical lines of reasoning can be employed to strip nukes of their human-centric, and thus safeguarded, rhetorical power; these arguments can be furthered to prove that nuclear weapons are not the “Gods” people view them to be. Their “mutually assured” destructiveness lacks the free will and choosing power that defines “Godliness” above mortal counterparts. It can be summarized as follows: nuclear weapons lack the value system of mortals and the autonomy of Gods, removing them from the human spectrum entirely. Our rhetoric must then be altered to accurately depict nuclear weapons for what they are: a serious existential threat on a hair-trigger for human demise.

After highlighting the mechanical, indiscriminate characteristics of nuclear weapons to be the antithesis of humans, we can begin to reshape the bigger picture, that is, imagining a nuclear crisis at large. In his work, “Can We Survive Technology?” von Neumann poses the question of “whether the ‘practical considerations,’ without the emotional counterpart, will suffice to restrain the human species?”. The suggestion of injecting the emotional component back into our understanding of nuclear weapons and their effects would be a method to counter Rendall’s “availability heuristic.” This method, however, poses challenges, as visually reviving the horrors of a nuclear atrocity, or generating them in such a way that is not cinematic, is very difficult. Alternatively, employing educational means to propagate nuclear awareness could make the threat real and present in people’s lives. Maya Deutchman experienced these effects on her psyche firsthand through her internship at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). She had previously only learned about nuclear war through dated high school U.S. History videos. The research she engaged in, guided by a publicly available Nuclear Weapons Syllabus, provided “new information [that] was discouraging and, honestly, kind of terrifying, yet taught about valuable, past efforts on nuclear security and disarmament that gave [her] hope.” So while snapshots of nuclear warfare in high school history fail to bring the urgency this existential threat deserves, a dedicated education program can better create motivation to act.

Specifically, a well-educated public will see the need and have the foundation to participate in scenario-building exercises as steps toward real action. A study by Stephanie Bryson found that belief and availability bias in individual contexts were overcome when “scenario process[es] prompt[ed] team members to devote attention to events that are less thought-about and lie beyond the immediately recalled.” This deviation from what Bryson’s study calls “business-as-usual thinking” further confirms that through “increasing the believability of possible future events, the scenario thinking process guides…problem solving toward a deeper understanding of the world.” The seemingly fantastical risk that is death by an enormous mushroom cloud can take on its true, catastrophic reality through widespread public education and the resulting solutions-eager, community-based, scenario-building mindsets.

After reframing what nuclear technology is and means in our everyday conversation, and further employing educational and community-based methods to bring attention to its catastrophic risk, we can move forward with action. The issue of path dependence is heightened in the face of what Daniel Metlay and Daniel Sarewitz refer to as “messy problems.” Problems like nuclear warfare exhibit both a “high degree of uncertainty about how options are linked to outcomes and substantial controversy over trade-offs among values” – both key attributes of messy problems. The ill-structured, morally difficult nature of addressing nuclear war forces us to rely on outdated, historical means of deterrence, and additionally justify our failure to pursue new solutions. To address the fact that historical methods are no longer viable in the present context, it requires a “transformation in the way a problem is conceived [as] a prerequisite for solving it.” For nuclear war, one must also acknowledge the existing political sentiments and, therefore, perceive the problem from an angle that does not further irritate these areas. This is not avoiding the problem, but rather opening up diverse solutions that are empowered by existing knowledge of why the nuclear dilemma persists.

A specific method for this was posed by Elinor Ostrom, where she claims polycentric systems are best suited for global catastrophe resolutions. Ostrom pushes for the “division of multiple governing authorities at differing scales rather than a monocentric unit.” Evidence for this comes from a case study of water industry performance carried out in California in the 1960s. It found that allocating water resources between multiple, unaffiliated units was successful without a clear hierarchy. Polycentrism is not limited by the enforcement costs, coordination failures in large groups, and “free-riding” of the commonly employed collective action problem/solution framework. With economic concerns and distrust being two major contributors to path dependency struggles, decision-makers could more easily adopt polycentric non-hierarchical methods, allowing for communities to employ diverse solutions on a smaller unified scale. While the impact may not be great immediately, it can serve as an exemplary or pilot-like improvement in the face of otherwise stagnation. Orstrom further argues that this creates “achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable” means, thus characterizing a positive feedback loop of success and problem-solving.

Nuclear war is an existential threat that is here and real, every second, yet we continue to ignore the catastrophic danger it poses. And while our current state of idleness can be attributed to humanization of weapons, lack of personal experience, and an inbred path dependency, there are methods to overcome these obstacles. From the bottom up, we must understand what a nuclear weapon is to fundamentally alter the inaccurate representation of it in our culture. Building upon this, education must be employed to overcome the emotional blindness shielding the reality and devastation that nuclear war poses and enabling effective solution-forward mindsets. Finally, the positive feedback loop induced by path dependency can be transformed into one of productivity by redefining the problem of nuclear war and addressing it in a step-wise, digestible manner. Let’s protect ourselves from our past by taking action toward a nuclear-free future.