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Fears about nuclear war are reaching a fever pitch. Another grim sign of the times | Judith Levine

Intimations of world war three – the big one, nuclear Armageddon – didn’t arise yesterday. But they got more urgent when Donald Trump was elected the second time. In December 2024, Newsweek published a map of the “safest US states to live during nuclear war”. The article was not reassuring. “Nowhere is truly ‘safe’” from such consequences as “contamination of food and water supplies and prolonged radiation exposure”, said the senior policy director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Another expert noted that “even a ‘small’ nuclear war would ... kill at least a billion people”.

And since 28 February, when the US and Israel began their bombardment of Iran, chatter about a world war has spiked, with everyone from anonymous social media users to Harvard policy wonks weighing in.

Speaking with the Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen this weekend, the Columbia University economist and public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs ticked off the many current or potential theaters of war, from Ukraine to Cuba. “We are probably in the early days of World War III,” Sachs concluded.

After it was reported that Russia is providing Iran with intelligence on US military positions in the Middle East, CBS News asked the British and US historian Niall Ferguson if world war three was brewing. “I don’t think a World War III is likely,” he replied. But “it’s not a crazy question.”

China continues to raise its defense spending to try to catch up with the US. In response to Russia’s unrelenting aggression against Ukraine – and Trump’s ambitions for Greenland – Europe has turned increasingly hawkish on nukes. Last week, France and Britain sent “defensive” warships to the eastern Mediterranean; yesterday, Macron said he would send 10 more. Australia sent a reconnaissance and command aircraft to help protect the Gulf’s airspace. Axios named nine more countries that might get involved soon, including Russia and North Korea.

ABC reported on Monday that Iran might be activating “sleeper cells” around the world. A terrorist act within US borders could serve to legitimize a widening war.

Having militarized immigration enforcement at home, Trump just inaugurated the Shield of the Americas, which could turn the Latin American front of the global war on drugs, a policing operation, into something closer to a literal combat zone. At a Florida summit presaging the first Shield meeting, he offered missiles to the Latin American attendees. “They’re extremely accurate,” he said, seemingly awed by modern weaponry. “Pyoom. Right into the living room. That’s the end of that cartel person.”

Trump has had an on-again-off-again thing with nukes. In 2017, when North Korean leader Kim Jong-un announced his nation was nearing completion of a nuclear weapon that could reach the US, Trump moved nuclear aircraft carriers into Korean waters. Tests continued, the game of chicken escalated, culminating in Trump’s declaration that if Kim did not back down, his country would suffer “fire and fury like the world has never seen”.

The following year, Trump pulled the US out of the multilateral Iran nuclear deal, calling it “horrible” and “one-sided”, and promised to negotiate a better one. He did not – arguably leading to where we are today.

A year ago, the president mused on restarting arms control negotiations with Russia and China. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” he told reporters at the White House. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over.” He was right. But last month, he allowed New Start, the 2010 US-Russian treaty capping the stockpiles of strategic nuclear warheads, to expire.

UN secretary-general, António Guterres, called the expiration a “grave moment”. With geopolitical tensions rising around the globe and no restraints on US and Russian arsenals, the risk of nuclear war was at its “highest in decades”, he said.

“If it expires, it expires,” Trump told the New York Times. “We’ll do a better agreement.” He hasn’t.

And all this was before the assault on Iran, perversely justified by the nuclear deal Trump couldn’t or wouldn’t finalize – a war that defense secretary Pete Hegseth declared will be fought with “no stupid rules of engagement”.

The prospect of a third world war is both so unimaginable and so real that we seem to have leapt from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s first stage of grief, denial, directly to its last one: acceptance. From contemplating the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the popular discourse has started to focus on dealing with its inevitability.

While the Washington Post advises readers on “war-proofing” their budget as gas prices rise, other news outlets are publishing service journalism on surviving nuclear winter as if it were a major snowstorm.

“Amid WW3 ‘fears,’ how safe is PA, DE in nuclear attack?” read a headline in Delaware Online Saturday. The piece answered such FAQs as “Is there a WW3 draft?” (no), and “Is Pennsylvania on the nuclear target list?” (yes). It linked to Under the Nuclear Cloud, a map prepared by Princeton University scientists based on computer simulations of the nuclear fallout of a hypothetical all-out attack on the US. The publication’s owner covered the same ground for residents of New Jersey, a bit further north of Washington DC. “Would NJ be safe in nuclear war? See fallout map, ‘dangerous’ spots.”

The takeaway: while Washington is an obvious target of nuclear attack, readers would be wise not to move to Montana, Wyoming or North Dakota, where the major silos are sited.

Then there’s the human-interest/business angle. On Sunday, the UK’s Telegraph profiled a Texan manufacturer of nuke-resistant “bunkers” whose business has been booming in the last few weeks. A fundamentalist Christian, he sees the metastasizing war as a sign of the End Times, which he is contently waiting out, serving his clientele, many of them also Christians eager for the rapture to come.

The tone of the piece is disturbingly breezy. The bunkers “range from vast, sprawling underground compounds worth more than $5m ... down to small pre-cast boltholes for those wishing to ride out doomsday in a budget-friendly $20,000 alternative”, it says. “With an aesthetic combining a submarine and a Bond-villain lair, the shelters can come with cinemas, swimming pools, an armory and fully equipped gun range inside.”

Also under the heading Disaster Capitalism is the online prediction market Polymarket, which brought in more than $800,000 in wagers on the question “Nuclear detonation by ... ?” Before public outcry forced the platform to take down the market, bettors put the odds at 22% by yearend. In a Reddit thread about the controversy one participant asked: “If I bet on total annihilation, and win, how am I going to collect?”

Dark times call for dark humor. But there is nothing funny about the world’s most powerful person making existential decisions for it appearing unperturbed, even titillated, by death and destruction. Denial of the worst is unacceptable. But so is acceptance. The last thing we need to feel about Armageddon is closure.