Although 81 years have passed since the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the rulers of major nations continue their reckless march toward a nuclear holocaust.
The nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), possessing some 12,100 nuclear warheads, are all busily upgrading and expanding their nuclear weapons arsenals at an accelerating pace. Nuclear weapons spending rose to an all-time high of $119 billion in 2025-- a 19 percent increase over the preceding year. The U.S. government alone, which accounted for more than half of this spending, is embarked on a $1.7 trillion, decades-long nuclear weapons buildup.
As the -- --International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has observed, "this overwhelming spending on nuclear weapons shows a willingness to research, develop, finance and build tools to exterminate humanity."
Moreover, international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements among the nuclear powers have collapsed. Russia and the United States own 86 percent of the world's nuclear weapons and, although they signed numerous treaties in the past to limit or reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals, the last of these treaties, New START, expired this February.
The accelerating nuclear arms race is accompanied by repeated threats of nuclear war. Russian officials are particularly notorious in this connection. According to the Voice of America, from early 2022 to late 2024 Russian officials publicly issued 135 nuclear threats, with 27 of them coming from Vladimir Putin. But America's Donald Trump has also publicly and repeatedly threatened other countries with nuclear destruction, as has North Korea's Kim Jong Un.
Early this year, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, assessing this deteriorating situation, moved the hands of their famous "Doomsday Clock" to 85 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting in its history.
Of course, there have been a great many warnings that nuclear weapons portend global disaster, including many beginning right after the shocking annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Seldom, if ever," reported CBS radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, "has war ended leaving the victors... with such a realization that... survival is not assured." The Chicago Tribune warned that a future atomic war would leave the world "a barren waste, in which the survivors... will hide in caves." In France, the resistance leader Albert Camus declared that the modern world had "reached the last degree of savagery," in which nations were faced with the prospect of "collective suicide."
As nuclear fear swept around the world, large numbers of people sought to avert catastrophe. Some called for dramatically strengthened global governance to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war, while others, with the same goal in mind, championed nuclear disarmament. Speaking on behalf of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein typified this popular uprising by arguing that "a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive."
Over subsequent decades, the antinuclear movement ebbed and flowed, but, at times of mass mobilization, it had an important effect on nuclear weapons policies. Naturally, the leaders of many nations felt the allure of nuclear weapons, especially after thousands of years of human history in which national security often seemed to rest upon military strength. Nevertheless, as indicated by opinion polls and massive demonstrations, antinuclear agitation inspired revulsion against nuclear weapons and nuclear war among large portions of the public. Consequently, most governments decided not to build nuclear weapons or even to deploy them on their territory.
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