Our Apocalypse-in-Waiting

THIS AUGUST MARKS 80 years since U.S. president Harry Truman issued orders to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The impact was so terrible that no head of state has done so since. Yet, eight decades later, 12,000 nuclear weapons are deployed around the world — a veritable apocalypse-in-waiting.

While many people are accustomed to thinking of climate change as our existential threat, we may overlook that nuclear arsenals are the first global threat entirely of humanity’s own making.