From the archive: Forgetting the apocalypse: why our nuclear fears faded – and why that’s dangerous

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  This is The Guardian. Hi, I'm Daniel Imrevar.

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  I'm the author of Forgetting the Apocalypse,

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  Why Our Nuclear Fears Faded and Why That's Dangerous, which was published in 2022.

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  The piece came about as a result of a conversation with my editor, David Wolff.

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  We are both younger, so we'd read a lot about nuclear war,

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  but as it was coming back up in the headlines with Russia's war in Ukraine,

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  both of us realized that we didn't have the same visceral Instincts about nuclear war than people older than us did and not that we were right and they were wrong or the other way around It's just that they had kind of lived in the fear of the war in the way that we had not and we sort of wondered what it was like To start living in a world where there were more people like us than like our elders and more people who just didn't have nuclear war looming in their heads has the kind of thing that could likely happen The pieces about the kind of slow forgetting of one of the major technological facts of our society,

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  which is that we could blow each other up at any moment.

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  And since I wrote that three years ago, we've only forgotten more.

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  So when I wrote the article, I said that there is one NATO leader who was...

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  Older than Hiroshima older than nuclear war and that was Joe Biden now there is no NATO leader who is older than nuclear war and so just every year we lose a little more of that memory and It does seem that

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  as we do that our nuclear taboos are fraying ever more and we've seen that happen in the war in Ukraine Last year Vladimir Putin formally lowered the threshold

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  for using nuclear weapons.

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  So not just that he might use them in a nuclear war,

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  but he might use them officially in response to a conventional strike.

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  There is only one remaining nuclear nonproliferation treaty between the United States and Russia,

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  and it's due to expire soon.

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  And with Putin and Trump, it's unclear if it will be renewed.

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  Welcome to The Guardian Long Read,

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  showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

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