Rarely has a movie timed the zeitgeist as perfectly as "Oppenheimer," the story of a man, and all humanity, becoming "death, the destroyer of worlds.” Real life seems hell-bent on imitating art these days.
The blame for the global spike in nuclear anxiety belongs mainly, but not exclusively, to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Surely the situation brought about by his invasion of Ukraine and his recurring rattles of the atomic saber must also change how the U.S. thinks about its own atomic strategy. But how exactly?
Putin has, over the past 500 days or so, destroyed each of the norms that developed during the Cold War to prevent an atomic arms race and Armageddon. First, he’s broken the nuclear taboo, by casually threatening the use of such diabolical weapons. Second, he’s undermined the consensus against nuclear proliferation, by demonstrating that foregoing nukes — as Ukraine did in the 1990s — leaves a nation vulnerable to people like him. Third, he’s chipped at the barrier between bad and good uses of fission, by turning the Ukrainian nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, occupied by his troops since last March, into a potential weapon of war.