Nuclear security

Why young people think nuclear weapons are history

Nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945. In 1989, the Berlin Wall began its long fall, and the border between East and West Germany opened. And in 2010, when I was 19, the presidents of the United States and Russia signed the New START treaty, vowing to reduce the number of deployed nuclear warheads. I cannot remember a time when the threat of nuclear weapons seemed real.

In school, my classmates and I studied World War II. We discussed the ethics of dropping atomic bombs, and I even wrote a paper on how using those weapons enabled the United States to avoid a much more costly and lethal ground invasion of Japan. Our teachers did not shy away from these topics, but we thought of nuclear weapons as history.