Public denial and avoidance have dulled awareness of the nuclear threat. Annie Jacobsen’s book, Nuclear War: A Scenario confronts that reality directly, challenging readers to face what has long been ignored.

As a psychologist, I have written about the psychological reactions of the public to the threat of nuclear war, i.e., why, in the face of such grave danger, are denial, avoidance and helplessness the modal response.

One reason is that many do not realise that the nuclear threat is as dangerous now as it was at the height of the Cold War. For an issue to be perceived as a threat, it has to be salient and identified as serious and realistic. But we rarely encounter information about the nuclear threat in our day-to-day lives. Although less important issues are covered endlessly in the media, this topic doesn’t garner the attention it deserves relative to its importance.

A related issue is that a “spurious normality” exists. As Jonathan Schell notes: “The spectacle of life going on as usual carried with it the strong presumption that nothing was wrong. When we observed that no one seemed to be worried, that no one was showing any signs of alarm . . . it was hard to resist the conclusion that everything was all right.”

We also haven’t developed imagery for nuclear war. As Jerome Frank puts it: “These weapons in distant places, poised to wipe us out, do not impinge on any of the senses, so it takes a........

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