Atomic Anxiety in the New Nuclear Age

In a world where there is a lot to worry about, understanding the interconnections between the causes of our concern can help us address them and build solidarity, writes Cooper Christiancy in the latest Atomic Anxiety Fellows blog. Read on to find out more…

It’s not just atomic anxiety keeping us up at night. In fact, there’s no shortage of foreboding about the future of the planet and its people. For examples, look no further than the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists “Doomsday Clock” (perhaps the most iconic symbol of atomic anxiety) which is now set at 85 seconds to midnight – the closest we have ever been.

The Doomsday Clock identifies apocalyptic threats arising not just from “the risks of nuclear war” but from climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers.

But why stop there? For those following current events, anxiety bubbles up from myriad sources: rising threats of conventional conflict as well as nuclear war, the breakdown in international and domestic rule of law, the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism amid democratic backsliding, the risk of new global pandemics, pollution, famine, and natural disasters, and so on and so forth. It’s a wonder we get any sleep at all.

Advocates who are keen to engage public attention and galvanize action for nuclear disarmament sometimes note the difficulty of activating the masses using atomic anxiety in a world where there is so much else to be anxious about. Sometimes, movements can be positioned against each other in the zero-sum game of limited attention spans and activist capacities.

So goes the fretting: what if people aren’t as worried as they should be about the collapse of the New Start Treaty, because they’re (very reasonably) preoccupied by existential threats to any number of other international frameworks, from the Paris Climate Agreement to the World Health Organization?

Amid our oversaturated media environment, an important challenge for building mass movements is finding solidarity through overlapping, paralyzing anxieties. However this is not necessarily a new challenge. The feminist anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott—a key organizer of Physicians for Social Responsibility—called out the “psychic numbing” that prevents us from fully grappling with death and disaster, nuclear-inflected and otherwise:

“To face nuclear war is facing the end of our immortality. Facing the end of our children that we leave behind, or the books we write…”

The same can be said of the existential dread that numbs action on totalitarianism, artificial intelligence, and climate change, as we’re pulled in various directions by various anxieties, and for many of us, that means staying static and moving in no direction at all.

One way of breaking through this paralysis is by identifying the legal, political, and economic systems that undergird them all, and proposing solidarity-based solutions that link together the fight against multiple anxieties—often under the framework of nuclear abolition.

Jasmine Owens distinguishes the nuclear abolition movement from the nuclear disarmament movement by noting this capacity to link together multiple campaigns:

“The nuclear abolition movement enables organizers to highlight how the elimination of nuclear weapons can help dismantle other oppressive systems.”

One such solidarity-based solution can arise from the overlap between atomic anxiety and socioeconomic anxiety. This is not to say that an “economic argument” against nuclear war is particularly compelling, but that the creation, maintenance, and storage of nuclear arsenals in and of themselves produce costs by diverting resources away from solutions to our quotidian anxieties: how we’ll (individually and collectively) pay for food, housing, healthcare, and other necessities.

Advocates for peace, disarmament, and development have long pointed to the ways that nuclear weapons (and military spending generally) perpetrate harm not just by killing, maiming, irradiating, or poisoning, but by diverting financial, technological, and human resources from pressing human needs.

We can see this concern echoing throughout many legal texts of nuclear disarmament and arms control regime. The preamble of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (the Treaty of Tlatelolco) states

“That the existence of nuclear weapons in any country of Latin America would … inevitably set off … a ruinous race in nuclear weapons which would involve the unjustifiable diversion … of the limited resources required for economic and social development.”

The preamble of the Non-Proliferation Treaty harkens back to the UN Charter’s call for maintaining international peace and security “with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources,” while the Preamble of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons also references that provision and expresses concern about “the waste of economic and human resources on programmes for the production, maintenance and modernization of nuclear weapons.”

In linking the nuclear arms complex, and military expenditures more generally, to social and economic inequality, paltry social services, high taxes, and spiraling debt, advocates can offer an alternative: a future achieved based on solidarity among movements against nuclear weapons and movements against poverty and inequality.

Physicians for Social Responsibility–Los Angeles, a core part of the United States’ Back from the Brink grassroots campaign for nuclear abolition, maintains a calculator that estimates of the average Americans’ tax contribution to the nuclear weapons program each year—released each year in time for the federal “Tax Day.”

While the focus on tax bills might at first seem individualistic, the crux of PSR-LA’s advocacy is spotlighting the costs of nuclear weapons to local communities: The calculator’s webpage emphasizes that “[nuclear] weapons also threaten us by robbing our communities of precious resources that could be redirected to the many needs that our communities cry out for.”

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons strikes a similar tone in its own accounting of nuclear weapons spending, which:

“is also diverting resources from real human priorities. $100 billion [the estimated amount spent on nuclear weapons in 2024] could have been used to fund measures to address the threats posed to our security by climate change and the loss of animal and plant species, or to provide funding for improving essential public goods, such as healthcare, housing and education.”

Indeed, identifying the diversion of resources toward nuclear weapons has been explicitly framed by nuclear abolitionists as a way to build solidarity with other groups.

As the website of the global coalition Abolition 2000 put it,

“public concern over economic crises and austerity budgets offers important opportunities to reach out to important new partners… working on climate change, war prevention, justice, environmental protection, sustainable development etc…” (emphasis added).

Finding solidarity in our anxieties can help mitigate the risk that anxious responses may worsen the root causes of our problems. Atomic anxiety is not a given precursor to nuclear abolition—as Zeenat Sabur notes in her contribution to this blog, the “anxiety of the use of nuclear weapons is also a political tool to justify the continuation of deterrence.”

Atomic anxiety might be a fear that our arsenals aren’t big enough, modern enough, or expanding quickly enough to quell our anxieties. The same risk is also at play in approaches that emphasize socioeconomic concerns in the context of nuclear weapons. Military spending, including nuclear weapons development, can be characterized as a tool of economic investment, job creation, and stimulus perhaps just as easily as it can be cast as a drain on strained fiscal resources. In a similar vein, Thomas Shattuck’s contribution to this blog showcases how the Trump Administration is linking nuclear security to the promise of economic investment in the United States.

Relying too heavily on socioeconomic anxiety to galvanize action might instead lead to a patchwork solution for one problem that worsens many others. Additionally, even if all nuclear weapons disappeared tomorrow, the billions freed up would still not resolve massive national and international material inequities, and thus disarmament is only a stepping stone toward an even more utopian future.

That said, solidarity-based solutions identify and address the roots of our anxieties—atomic, economic, and otherwise, and begin the process of moving toward that better future.

Finding solidarity through our anxieties avoids responses that might reify the underlying systems that have produced our current status quo in the first place. In academic and advocacy spaces that frequently silo into single issues and singular “anxieties,” what new ground might we unlock by being more explicit about our cross-cutting solidarities?

In other words, there is power in more clearly identifying, both for ourselves and for external audiences, the shared systems of oppression represented by, constructed by, and maintained through nuclear weapons—and then offering solutions aimed at dismantling these systems.

There is much to keep us up at night, but there might be comfort in knowing that even as we toss and turn amid myriad anxieties, we might find solidarity in our shared fears.

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Cooper Christiancy is Research and Academics Manager at the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas School of Law, where he carries out research on human rights, environmental justice, and nuclear disarmament and supports students pursuing careers in human rights.

Cooper joined the Rapoport Center from the Promise Institute for Human Rights at the UCLA School of Law, where he served as the Research and Advocacy Advisor to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism.  He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2021 with concentration honors in both Human Rights and International Law.

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.