“If you take a look right now, the ‘nuclear’ word is being mentioned all the time,” Donald Trump observed last year. The former (and perhaps future) US president blamed his weak-willed successor, rather dubiously, for the proliferation of what he described as one of two “N-words” better left unsaid by political leaders. But he was on to something nevertheless. After decades of relative dormancy, nuclear concern has emerged again. Trump himself was perhaps the original cause, as the most conspicuously unstable quarterback ever to handle the American nuclear “football”. But in the last eight years, the reasons for anxiety have multiplied: escalating tensions between the US and China; North Korea’s first successful thermonuclear test; an increasingly militarist posture in India; and devastating demonstrations of the atrocities that military decision-makers in Russia and Israel are willing to perpetrate.
Culture has kept pace. Novelists in the years after the 2016 US election imagined Trump pressing the button – Hanna Jameson in The Last, Mark Doten in Trump Sky Alpha, and more abstractly, Rumaan Alam in Leave the World Behind, now a major motion picture made by the Obamas’ production company. HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries reminded us of the danger of the vast Soviet nuclear infrastructure that is largely in Vladimir Putin’s hands. And then there was Oppenheimer. Analysts have tended to attribute the staggering commercial success of Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biographical epic to the hunger of an audience starved of serious mainstream cinematic fare by Marvel hegemony, which is surely part of the story. But I suspect that its triumph also has to do with worries about nuclear weapons. The New York Times, astutely, has responded to Oppie-mania by launching a new essay series on the risk of nuclear catastrophe entitled “At the Brink”.
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