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In a recent article for the Atlantic magazine, the journalist Tom Nichols says, when he was in college, there were reminders about the threat of nuclear war everywhere in popular culture.

It's one of the reasons he says there was this prevailing anxiety about the future because films in the media made a catastrophic conflict seem real and immediate.

Movies offered spectacle, but they were also warnings, and it gave Americans this

shared vocabulary to talk about the unthinkable.

But Nichols says these days, a new generation has different fears, so they're not really thinking about the atomic age and the way he was when he was young.

And he told us he noticed this when he was teaching a class about nuclear weapons.

And I had this actually happen a few times, but I still remember this one student in particular who said, look, I get it.

Nuclear weapons are bad, but, you know, what were you all so afraid of?

What was a big deal?

I didn't even know what to say for a moment. And I pointed at the clock that was

you know, above the lectern. And I said, because by the time our class meeting is over,

most of the Northern Hemisphere could be dead. Hundreds of billions of people.

And there was this kind of stunned look of, you know, when did that become a thing?

They were oddly both the beneficiaries and victims of a kind of cultural exhaustion that set in in the early 1990s just after the Cold War ended.

Russia was our friend.

We were reducing nuclear weapons pretty much as fast as we could.

And so with the collapse of our ideological opponent, people wanted to move on.

I mean, existential dread is exhausting.

And people don't want to think about it.

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