For decades, Americans lived in fear of nuclear annihilation. Today, that fear has faded — and with it, our sense of urgency. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s recent warning of “nuclear holocaust” is a wake-up call for a generation that’s dangerously detached from the stakes.
We’ve spent the last year traveling around the world meeting the survivors of nuclear war for a documentary for public television. In Hiroshima, we met Koko Kondo, whose mother clawed her way out of a burning house while holding her. In Nagasaki, we met Dr. Masao Tomonaga, who survived the bomb as a child and now treats Japan’s hibakusha (survivors) for leukemia, depression and more.
In North Branch, Minn., we met Michas Ohnstad, an Army veteran who, as an 18-year-old in 1945, assisted American and Japanese doctors in performing autopsies on victims of the bomb in Hiroshima. To this day, he suffers from nightmares and severe PTSD.
In Taylor, Texas, we met 100-year-old Marine veteran Archie Moczygemba, who was one of the first U.S. Marines to enter Nagasaki in September 1945. He is still haunted by the burns on the victims’ skin, in the shape of the chrysanthemums on their kimonos.
And in Columbia, S.C., we met veteran Larry Pressley, who recalled the U.S. military’s vague fear of radiation poisoning — enough that Larry and his fellow Marines were given bottled water to drink, but not enough that they were given water to shower in. They were all exposed to Nagasaki’s toxic water supply, and many died of cancer.
These are the human faces of nuclear war, and they’re proof that even those who survive never really escape.
We don’t need to return to duck-and-cover drills in classrooms, but we do need the urgent recognition of what’s at stake. If anything, the nuclear threat has grown more complex and unpredictable. Nuclear arsenals still number in the thousands. Treaties have eroded. New powers have emerged. And with modern technology, artificial intelligence interference could spark catastrophe.
Instead, in the summer of 2023, nuclear weapons became a meme. When the films “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were released on the same day, content creators crafted Barbie’s hair into a fluffy pink mushroom cloud, while others mashed images from the movie together. The images went viral.
In schools, students learn about the horrors of the Holocaust, but not about the horrors of radiation. Americans of our generation understand very little, in fact, of the aftermath of nuclear war. It’s not our fault — it’s the result of decades of cover-ups and classified files, a misguided education system and the slow ebb of complacency.
It’s grim, so we don’t think about it. But to keep us safe, we still need the real, visceral fear of the 1950s that the world could, in fact, end. And we need the modern-day understanding that even if it doesn’t, surviving is sometimes a worse fate.
The threat of nuclear war isn’t gone. It’s just that it isn’t trending. We assume someone, somewhere, is handling it.
But what if they’re not?
