In the latest blog post by our 2025 Atomic Anxiety Fellows cohort, Eleonora Neri reflects on atomic anxiety, nuclear testing and the work of the Comprensive Test Ban Treaty…
I will never forget my time interning at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) when, on 6 January 2016, the International Monitoring System picked up an unusual seismic event in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
As I watched the organization’s verification machinery spring into motion – a global network of sensors designed to detect any sign of possible nuclear test – I felt the weight of what had just happened.
The world’s silence had been broken: the DPRK had conducted its fourth nuclear test. I was struck by the paradox at the heart of CTBTO’s mission: we spend our days listening for something we hope never to hear.
And yet, while that explosion marked a grave moment for international peace and security, it also proved the importance of the monitoring system itself. On that day, the International Monitoring System (IMS) did exactly what it was designed to do: detect, analyze, and confirm that the event was a man-made explosion with precision, speed and transparency.
The IMS is one of humanity’s quiet triumphs: a unique global network of over 300 stations around the globe using four technologies that listen to the low rumble of earthquakes (seismic), the whisper of ocean waves (hydroacoustic), the inaudible disturbances in the upper atmosphere (infrasound), and the invisible traces of radionuclides carried on the wind (radionuclide). Amid this vast symphony of natural sound, the system listens for something deeply unnatural: the acoustic fingerprint of a nuclear explosion.
It was only later, when I served as the CTBTO Desk Officer at the Permanent Mission of Japan to the International Organizations in Vienna, that I began to truly grasp the meaning of atomic anxiety. For Japan, the only nation to have suffered atomic bombings, this anxiety is not abstract. The country has felt, in its very skin, the terror and trauma of nuclear destruction. And in serving there, I felt, for the first time, that anxiety in my own skin.
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and its verification regime are not merely instruments of law, but expressions of conscience. For Japan this is more than diplomacy, it is remembrance. The task before us was to help ensure that this anxiety fades into history, never to be lived again. This is not only a political responsibility, but a profoundly human one.
By ending nuclear testing, the CTBT halts the first step in the making of nuclear weapons. It curbs not only the spread of arms to new possessors, but also the pursuit of more advanced and more lethal generations by those who already hold them. Each signal transmitted from remote corners of the world to the International Data Centre (IDC) in Vienna is a fragment of a global promise: that the age of nuclear testing must not return.
This kind of silence requires cooperation on a global scale. The IMS’s stations are hosted by 89 countries, many with differing political systems and histories. Maintaining them depends on political will and financial commitment as much as on technical expertise. Every functioning station represents not only a node in a global network but also a point of trust between nations.
The CTBT has established a norm so strong that since the Treaty opened for signature in 1996, the world has witnessed fewer than a dozen nuclear tests. In fact, on 14 January 2026, in what will be the year of the CTBT’s 30th anniversary, the world will set a new record, marking the longest period without a single test since the first detonation at Trinity.
The Treaty’s strength lies in its quiet confidence: the assurance that any clandestine test will be heard and seen, that the world will know. In that assurance lies a kind of deterrence born not of threat but of transparency. In that certainty, atomic anxiety begins to fade, replaced by trust in our shared capacity for peace.
Working in this field taught me how fragile this silence can be. When tensions rise or arms control falters, that silence feels thinner. Yet technology endures: the instruments still listen, the signals still travel, and the CTBTO helps calm global anxiety. Last year, its network swiftly dispelled rumors of a nuclear test in Iran after two small tremors. Data from its monitoring stations confirmed no nuclear explosion, quietly restoring calm amid uncertainty.
The CTBT verification regime transforms listening into power. And this power is recognized by 187 States that have signed the Treaty, with only nine yet to do so, demonstrating global support for a Treaty that has not yet entered into force but that continues to ease atomic anxiety.
The silence we seek is not merely technical; it is political, ethical, and existential. It is the silence of restraint, of nations holding back. It is the quiet confidence that treaties still matter, that verification still works, and that trust can be built not on faith but on data.
Earlier this year, as the world marked the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, I walked through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The air inside was still. It was a different kind of silence from the one I had known at the CTBTO. In Vienna, silence meant the absence of a nuclear test; in Hiroshima, it spoke of remembrance, of lives lost, of the unbearable weight of what once shattered the sky.
Standing there, I felt how these two silences – one of vigilance, the other of memory – are bound together. Both are acts of humanity: one listens to ensure it never happens again; the other remembers so that it is never forgotten. Silence, after all, is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of peace and the fading of atomic anxiety.
Eleonora Neri is currently the Programme & Research Coordinator at the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA). She has held roles at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Permanent Mission of Japan to the International Organizations in Vienna, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), and the Alva Myrdal Centre for Nuclear Disarmament (AMC) at Uppsala University.
This blog is part of a series of articles by the Atomic Anxiety in the New Nuclear Age Fellows Cohort. These articles represent the view of the author and not necessarily those of the project as a whole or other individuals associated with the project.
Atomic Anxiety in the New Nuclear Age 
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