“May you burn in hell like you are going to burn here.”
— Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, upon ordering a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union at the conclusion of a Pentagon nuclear war game in 1983
For eighty years, the world has lived with the knowledge that a small number of nations have it in their power, in an instant, to commit genocide, to destroy civilization, and to eradicate most forms of life on Earth. In the main, international society has accommodated itself to this fact of the nuclear age in much the same way people accommodate themselves to the fact that they might be run over by a car, bitten by a shark, or attacked by an ax murderer. These events are all possible, of course, but none is felt constantly to be likely or imminent, and so each occupies space in dark precincts of the mind, emerging only occasionally through an act of the subconscious or when called forth by a tragic news report or a popcorn horror show.