Why nuclear Armageddon is a very real danger

The Cold War might be over, but nuclear brinkmanship is still going strong

The threat of nuclear war still lingers.
(Image credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS)

At the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other, many of them on hair-trigger alert. The prospect of nuclear war was a grim specter that hung over the entire civilized world.

As a teenager in the 1980s, I would lay in bed at nights thinking about Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles lifting off from the Kartaly Missile Field, arcing over the North Pole, and landing in the United States. I knew the journey would take, more or less, 20 minutes.

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Kyle Mizokami is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Daily Beast, TheAtlantic.com, The Diplomat, and The National Interest. He lives in San Francisco.