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Hundreds of lit torches cut the bitter cold on the streets of Oslo one night in December 2017. I happened to be in the city when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and I found myself swept up in the procession that honors the prize’s winner every year. ICAN campaigners greeted us from a balcony, but the mood was more mournful than joyous: North Korea was aggressively pursuing nuclear testing, and President Trump had responded by threatening to retaliate with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” For all of ICAN’s work, nuclear war felt closer than ever. I thought back to that night while reading Scott W. Stern’s Atlantic essay this week about Jon Else’s Frenchman Flat, a new book about, as Stern describes it, “the heroism and the absurdity of our atomic present and this Strangelovian, Lovecraftian thing we call ‘nuclear policy.’”
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- A diagnosis for social conflict that gets lost along the way
- What comes after America
- A nation of strange, idle men
- Cormac McCarthy’s midlife crisis
Since that night in Norway, the threat of nuclear war has only seemed to grow, thanks to events such as the war in Ukraine and the United States’ ongoing conflict with Iran, and heightened tension between India and Pakistan. In August of last year, this magazine dedicated an issue to the subject. Stern notes that “today, the famous Doomsday Clock, which measures the risk of nuclear cataclysm, is at just 85 seconds from midnight, the closest it’s been to Armageddon since the clock’s creation in 1947.”
How might we avoid the disaster that has loomed in the world’s imagination for eight decades? Else doesn’t think that ICAN or similar groups hold the answer; he writes that getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether isn’t realistic. Still, Frenchman Flat leads Stern to a powerful idea: The threat of these weapons encourages governments to practice secrecy, but avoiding annihilation might require the opposite—a push for greater transparency.
In building his argument, Stern references several other books in the rich literature on nuclear development. In that spirit, I’d like to suggest some further reading too. In a 2024 Atlantic article, Jared Sullivan recommended Dan Zak’s Almighty, which tells the story of, among other incidents, an anti-nuclear activist group breaking into a uranium-enrichment facility. (When Sullivan wrote about the book, Zak worked at The Washington Post; happily, we’re now colleagues.) I’ve written before about Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl, a tick-tock history of the 1984 meltdown, but last year, Melanie Arndt published a fitting companion: Chernobyl Children follows the young people whose worlds were upended by the disaster. Arndt’s book is mostly about the dangerous effects of the Soviet Union’s secrecy, and as Anastasia Edel wrote in The Atlantic, it looks ahead to “a future in which disasters aren’t confined to a single place.”
I haven’t gotten around to every book I’d like to read about nuclear weapons. Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb has been on my list since my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote about its influence on an important group of AI researchers. And Stern’s article bumped another title higher up on my queue: Garry Wills’s Bomb Power, the prolific historian’s take on how the weapon transformed the presidency and the U.S. government forever. Although these bombs have been used in war only twice, they’ve left no part of our world untouched—and as Stern notes, the more information we share about them, the better positioned we may be to contain them.
Why the Bomb Is Bad for Democracy
By Scott W. Stern
A famous documentarian’s new book suggests that secrecy is a major impediment to sensible nuclear policy.
What to Read
Enough Is Enuf, by Gabe Henry
Few books have made me laugh harder or more frequently than Henry’s exploration of the English language’s nonsensical writing system—one in which the spelling of words tells us precious little about how they’re pronounced—and the centuries of failed attempts to fix it. Enough Is Enuf chronicles some of the staunchest advocates of “simplified spelling” systems (including Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the dictionary maker Noah Webster), each of whom attempted to streamline the haphazard rules of written English—a uniquely weird amalgamation of other, older languages. Henry’s book sits at the nexus of linguistics and history—two subjects that can be daunting, in many cases making for dry reading—but it is brisk and entertaining, full of archival images, clarifying examples, and hilarious anecdotes. By its end, you’ll likely feel grateful for the miracle that is your own literacy and eager to read more about quirky characters, both human and lexicographic. — Sophia Stewart
From our list: What to read to wake up your brain
Out Next Week
📚 Hollywood, Ending, by John Green
📚 An Unexpected Life, by Gloria Steinem
📚 Mazywood, by Tananarive Due
Your Weekend Read
The Dead Silence of AI Therapy
By Steven Barrie-Anthony
I was trained across diverse theories and techniques, but in my clinical work I have found that the cornerstone of the process is feeling. The patient’s emotional experience is the destination and the terrain. But I also feel; I am moved. And the work I do with my patients relies on our relationship and our capacity for mutual feeling. In many ways, the history of my field from Freud on has been a growing acknowledgement of the reality of this relationship—moving from the therapist as sealed off and standing apart, toward approaches that view the real human relationship between patient and therapist as the territory where healing happens.
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