The candidates in the coming election in the United States have said little, certainly nothing coherently, about nuclear weapons. Yet those weapons continue to haunt us, even as they move in and out of our conscious awareness.

We are reminded of that by the recent revelation of a shift in the American strategy of “nuclear deterrence” to give greater emphasis to China because of evidence of its rapid build-up of the weapons. [1] What that suggests is that China has been granted the dubious status as player in the game of bringing an end to humanity.

This kind of “nuclear end”, as we came to call it in the antinuclear movement, was oddly treated in the recent Musk interview of Trump. Trump spoke vaguely of “nuclear warming,” though he has constantly dismissed the danger of climate change. Musk referred to the relatively rapid rebuilding of Nagasaki as a thriving city, failing to recognize that reconstruction was possible only because of the existence of an outside world to bring the necessary energy and know-how for such rebuilding. The use of contemporary nuclear weapons would allow for no such outside world. And the statement also ignores the residual pain and nuclear fear in that city. [2]

And in her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech, Kamala Harris committed herself to a military that “always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world." [3] We do not know whether she had nuclear weapons in mind.

What are the nuclear truths that are still rarely taken into account?

The weapons represent a revolution in the human capacity for destructiveness. Whether we begin with battlefield use of relatively small nuclear weapons or with larger ones, we are likely to bring about a “nuclear winter,” the blocking out of the........

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