Introduction

This report asks why Americans’ awareness of catastrophic risk so seldom translates into political or civic engagement, and how nuclear danger might be reframed to regain salience in a crowded risk environment. To address this question, it traces the trajectory of U.S. public opinion on nuclear weapons—especially across generational, gender, and partisan lines—and compares American perceptions of nuclear danger with attitudes toward other global catastrophic risks and with international trends. Drawing on polling data, behavioral research, and decision theory, the analysis investigates how ordinary reasoning processes filter, discount, and normalize nuclear threats. It situates public inattention not as ignorance but as an understandable—if perilous—adaptation to uncertainty: a psychological accommodation to risks that feel abstract, remote, and beyond individual control.

Seen through this lens, the question is not simply why Americans appear indifferent, but how that indifference takes shape. By integrating empirical data with insights from cognitive science, this report explains why recognition of nuclear danger so rarely becomes mobilization. It concludes with recommendations for reframing nuclear communication and policy engagement to make risk visible, actionable, and shared once again.

During the Cold War, public engagement with nuclear issues reached a remarkable scale.¹ Grassroots protests, women-led movements, and civic organizations mobilized millions around the shared goal of reducing nuclear danger.² The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear test explosions in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater, illustrates how public sentiment once decisively shaped U.S. nuclear policy.³ Revelations from the Baby Tooth Survey—showing radioactive strontium-90 from atmospheric tests accumulating in children’s teeth—transformed abstract fears into an intimate health concern.⁴ By 1963, roughly four in five Americans supported the treaty, giving President Kennedy a strong mandate; the Senate ratified it by a bipartisan vote of 80-14, signaling rare alignment between public pressure and political action.⁵

The Limited Test Ban Treaty was not an isolated case. Across the 1970s and 1980s, mass mobilization again influenced policy through the Nuclear Freeze campaign, where nearly 70 percent of Americans favored a bilateral halt to testing, production, and deployment.⁶ Local ballot measures, congressional resolutions, and high-profile advocacy by civic, religious, and professional groups turned technical issues into moral imperatives and visible demands for restraint.⁷ Public opinion shaped the tone of U.S.-Soviet negotiations and helped legitimize later arms control initiatives, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

These movements succeeded not only because nuclear danger felt urgent and imaginable, but also because there were clear pathways for action. Fear translated into participation: marching, voting, lobbying. The media was less fragmented, civil society more organized, and political trust higher—allowing momentum to build from local activism to national policy.

By contrast, today’s risk environment lacks the connective tissue that once linked sentiment to strategy. Nuclear threats remain, but the feedback loops between public concern and political response have weakened, leaving a field rich in expertise but short on civic power.

Recent assessments across policy, scientific, and technical communities are converging on the judgment that nuclear dangers are acute and worsening. The 2025 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook warns that “a dangerous new nuclear arms race is emerging at a time when arms control regimes are severely weakened,” noting that nearly all nine nuclear-armed states are actively modernizing their arsenals.⁸ Similarly, a 2023 National Academy of Sciences study estimates that roughly 12,500 to 13,000 nuclear weapons remain globally, after decades of arms control, and emphasizes that renewed political tensions, particularly between the United States and China, are heightening risks.⁹

Recent technical analyses underscore that the danger is no longer limited to the prospect of full-scale nuclear exchange, as it may have been at the height of the Cold War. A 2022 report from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory argues that nuclear risk must now be understood more broadly, from limited nuclear use to catastrophic exchanges, because even small detonations can trigger cascading humanitarian, economic, and geopolitical consequences.¹⁰

Furthermore, today these dangers are compounded by the emergence of new technologies. Joshua A. Schwartz and Michael C. Horowitz, for example, raise concerns that automated or AI-assisted systems could make nuclear threats appear more credible in coercive situations, thereby increasing the risk of misperception and miscalculation. The addition of an AI dimension makes the nuclear danger feel more immediate and potentially less controllable.¹¹

Finally, a new stream of scientific work brings greater precision to our understanding of the humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear use. Writing in The Lancet, medical experts have urged the World Health Organization to expand its role in reporting nuclear risks for public health, stressing that “with a new nuclear arms race underway, authoritative current information…has never been more vital.”¹² Complementing this work, Sebastian Phillipe has combined simulations of nuclear war consequences—including silo-field fallout, atmospheric transport models, and population data—with environmental, ethnographic, and journalistic research. His work estimates fatalities resulting from U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile modernization and examines the broader risks associated with future deployments.¹³

All told, we see a risk environment in which nuclear dangers are not only persistent but accelerating, intensified by technological change, geopolitical rivalry, and renewed attention to cascading human and environmental effects. Against this backdrop, public awareness and activism have waned—just when engagement is most needed.

Across U.S. media and culture, nuclear risk has reentered public discourse with striking intensity in recent years. News coverage, fiction, and film now depict nuclear war, accidents, and near-miss crises with unprecedented realism. A Washington Post opinion series produced with the Federation of American Scientists and a New York Times opinion series led by W.J. Hennigan vividly chronicle renewed nuclear dangers—from close calls in deterrence signaling to the fragility of command-and-control systems—reflecting a broader reawakening of concern about how near catastrophe might be.¹⁴

This resurgence extends across popular culture. Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer revives nuclear history as a moral and political drama; Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, released in 2025, dramatizes a launch scenario with technical precision. Annie Jacobson’s 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario translates classified processes into a minute-by-minute nonfiction narrative.¹⁵ Together with predecessors like Jeffrey Lewis’s 2018 speculative novel, these works represent a wave of realist portrayals—part of a growing trend in “useful fiction” that treats narrative realism as a tool for strategic foresight.¹⁶

Yet this cultural reawakening reflects a theory of change long familiar to funders and advocates, from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in the 1980s to contemporary philanthropic initiatives: the belief that vivid, emotionally powerful depictions of nuclear danger can mobilize public opinion and drive reform.¹⁷ Yet, despite their sophistication and reach, such efforts have produced only fleeting engagement. Public concern spikes but rarely endures, even when depictions avoid overt alarmism.

The limitation lies not in artistic failure or ignorance, but in deeper psychological and structural factors: Warning fatigue, desensitization, and competing priorities dull the response even when awareness is high. Decision theory helps explain why. When threats are diffuse, probabilistic, and temporally distant, even credible warnings fail to sustain attention or motivate collective action. The challenge, then, is not simply to render nuclear danger more realistic, but to transform awareness into agency—reframing communication, media, and policy outreach to engage people as capable actors rather than passive witnesses.