Image by and machines.

I interviewed three anti-nuke activists to understand the Doomsday Clock and how our society thinks about the very real threat of nuclear war.

“Dear young people who have never experienced war, ‘Wars begin covertly. If you sense it coming, it may be too late.’” -Takato Michishita, survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon in the Catskill Mountains where New Yorkers went for the summer to escape the city heat, Alice Slater’s mother took her to go see a movie in town. It was late summer in 1945, and the second World War had just ended. Alice remembers parading around the Catskills town a few weeks earlier as everyone celebrated the end of the war. When I asked her when she first became aware of nuclear weapons, the first thing she thought to tell me was about her trip to the theater with her mom. Instead of trailers before the movies they used to show news reels. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima projected across the screen and Alice asked her mom, “What is that?”

“That’s a wonderful new weapon and now all the boys would come home,” her mom answered.

Between what they showed on the screen and what her mom had told her, at that moment Alice had no real idea what a nuclear bomb was, or what it did to the people it was used on. It was only a mushroom cloud, and the mushroom cloud meant the war was over.

Seventeen years later, Alice was a young mom who had moved to the suburbs of New York City. Her husband was working for CBS and one day he didn’t come home – he had to stay at work to deal with breaking news for a handful of days. The world had just found out that the Soviet Union, bringing us to the height of the Cold War between Washinton and Moscow, put nukes just 90 miles off the coast of the United States in Cuba. Alice, even with close proximity to someone who worked in the news, had no idea what was happening. Americans didn’t know the US had nukes near the Russian border in Turkey, too. All they knew was that the communists were threatening them with nuclear bombs. We are far removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis now, but Alice said it was probably the most afraid she’s ever been. People really thought we were about to enter another war and send the entire world into a nuclear winter. Later people found out Kennedy had negotiated to move US nukes out of Turkey. But now they’re back, and scattered all over Europe.

Carol Gilbert, around the same week Alice’s husband didn’t come home from CBS, was at her aunt’s house in Michigan. She was around fifteen years old at the time and she remembered that it must have been during the school year........

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