‘I Taste Ashes in the Wind’

Ever since the end of the cold war, the subject of nuclear war and the profound threat it poses to humanity has suffered a “peculiar invisibility.” This is the phrase the German philosopher Günther Anders used in his book The Obsolescence of the Human (1956) to illuminate the roots of the “Apokalypse-Blindheit”—“apocalypse blindness”—that had begun to set in just a few years after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.1 Seventy years on, despite the construction of gigantic nuclear arsenals and several near catastrophes, the blindness persists.Today each of America’s fourteen nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines is capable of launching 160 warheads with a combined explosive force of up to 73,000 kilotons, roughly the equivalent of five thousand Hiroshimas. The Russians possess a similar capability. A mere fraction of the nuclear weapons that exist today could kill millions of people within minutes. Hundreds of detonations could ignite massive fires, lofting soot into the atmosphere and blocking sunlight, potentially triggering a nuclear winter. The resulting disruption to global food systems would threaten billions of people with starvation.This dark realit...