It often feels like the world is more dangerous than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The international geopolitical and geoeconomic orders established by the United States through international institutions in the aftermath of World War II are undergoing profound and unpredictable changes with little certainty about how the world will be ordered in the 21st century.

Amid this institutional shift, the threat posed by nuclear weapons, once an ever-present concern among policymakers and the public during the Cold War, has faded from the forefront of public consciousness. Short-term tactical issues such as the wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, and medium-term strategic issues such as those surrounding contingencies in the South China Sea and Taiwan, have taken increasing space in policymakers’ and the public’s minds, crowding out nuclear risks.

As nuclear risk has receded from view, so too has the institutional infrastructure to study, communicate, and mitigate that risk. Universities, think tanks, NGOs, and government offices dedicated to nuclear policy have diminished, and with them, opportunities for emerging nuclear specialists. This erosion presents a looming crisis in strategic nuclear expertise in the United States and its allies. Yet, the present environment offers a chance to rethink how nuclear knowledge is cultivated, sustained, and connected to the broader policy landscape by breaking nuclear policy out of the silos which have been erected around it.

In July 2025, the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory convened a workshop on Nuclear Order and Global Disorder. This article reflects on concerns raised during that event and explores the broader decline of the nuclear policy field. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent any organization or employer.

A World Distracted

During the Cold War, the threat of nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was understood, and feared, at every level of society. Children practiced “duck and cover” drills, blockbuster films like The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), The Day After (1983), and The Hunt for Red October (1990) dramatized nuclear tensions, and events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and atmospheric nuclear testing kept the acute tension of nuclear risk firmly top of mind for the public and policymakers alike.

Today, nuclear weapons are just one of many existential risks facing society. In the last five years, we’ve lived through a global pandemic, witnessed the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence, and seen increasingly severe climate-related disasters. Policymakers and publics have long suffered from recency bias, and other threats are immediate and tangible in ways nuclear war no longer seems to be.

This shift in focus has significant consequences. When the perceived threat of nuclear war diminishes, so too does political and financial investment in nuclear risk reduction. Policymakers, especially elected officials who are driven by constituents’ concerns, are less likely to prioritize limited time to understanding nuclear issues, and as a result, research funding and institutional support dwindle. We are already witnessing a reduction in philanthropic funding for nuclear risk reduction, which is now just $40–50 million annually, a figure set to fall further after the MacArthur Foundation, which had provided roughly 30% of total funding, withdrew from the field entirely in 2024.

Paradoxically, the success of nuclear deterrence and arms control may be contributing to complacency, even as underlying risks remain unchanged or, in some cases, have intensified. When the Cold War ended in 1991, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ set their doomsday clock — which equates humankinds’ destruction to “midnight” — to 17 minutes to midnight, the lowest level since the clock was started in 1947. Today that clock is set to 85 seconds to midnight. Ironically, the stability created by mutual deterrence has eroded the political will and institutional infrastructure needed to manage risks that deterrence cannot eliminate, especially during the unipolar moment when the United States lacked a peer competitor in many minds.

The response to North Korea nuclearization offers a clear example of this trend. In the 1990s and early 2000s, North Korea’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons created clear policy responses across policy makers and the public. Large amounts of political capital were expended by the Clinton and Bush administrations to prevent North Korea from going nuclear via the agreed framework and six-party talks, and North Korean issues broke though in unique ways in movies such as Team America. Nearly two decades later, however, a nuclear-armed North Korea is widely seen as an unfortunate but accepted status quo. Outside specialized policy circles, serious concern about its arsenal has all but disappeared, even though the risk has not.

The expiration of the New START treaty in February 2026 represents perhaps the starkest institutional casualty of this broader erosion. For over three decades, a succession of bilateral arms control agreements provided not just verifiable limits on deployed strategic warheads, but a structured framework that sustained diplomatic channels, supported specialized expertise on both sides, and gave policymakers concrete mechanisms through which to engage nuclear risk.

With New START’s laps and Russia having suspended its participation in February 2023, foreclosing the near-term possibility of meaningful negotiation, the United States and Russia operate without formal limits on their strategic arsenals for the first time since 1972. The consequences extend beyond warhead counts. The verification regimes embedded in these treaties trained generations of inspectors, analysts, and diplomats whose skills have no obvious peacetime substitute. As those professionals age out of the field and institutional memory fades, rebuilding that capacity will take years that a deteriorating security environment may not have. The absence of New START is both a symptom of the broader decline in nuclear expertise and a cause of its acceleration, a feedback loop that, left unaddressed, leaves the world navigating its most dangerous nuclear moment in decades with a steadily diminishing capacity to do so.

A Profession in Peril

The declining salience of nuclear risk has hollowed out the professional field devoted to understanding and mitigating it. As government and philanthropic funding shifts toward other issues such as pandemics, AI, climate, career opportunities specific to nuclear policy have narrowed. For Millennials and Gen Z professionals, the barriers to entering and staying in the field are growing. Without targeted efforts to rebuild the talent pipeline, the community of experts capable of managing nuclear threats may soon be too thin to meet future challenges, including potential proliferation and the continuing growth of China’s nuclear arsenal.

To remain relevant and resilient, the nuclear field must embrace an interdisciplinary approach, creating more practitioners who consider nuclear risk in their work, even if they do not possess in-depth knowledge of all aspects of nuclear risk. Practitioners should seek to engage with broader policy communities focused on existential risks and demonstrate how nuclear risk intersects with their work. Climate scientists, for instance, are natural interlocutors: the atmospheric consequences of even a limited nuclear exchange—the so-called “nuclear winter” effect—represent one of the most severe climate forcing events imaginable, and the two communities could better integrate their work.

AI ethicists and safety researchers are similarly well-positioned partners. Concerns about the integration of autonomous systems into nuclear command and control are no longer hypothetical. There are ongoing debates within the U.S. Department of Defense and among allied militaries about AI-enabled early-warning systems which raise serious questions about whether algorithmic speed could compress human decision timelines in a crisis to the point where meaningful oversight becomes impossible. Global health experts, meanwhile, have spent decades building frameworks for modeling catastrophic and low-probability, high-consequence risks that translate directly to nuclear scenarios. These approaches would serve to broaden the number of practitioners who intuitively build nuclear risk into their operating frameworks, and would conversely provide opportunities for those interested in nuclear risk to also work in other fields where their knowledge would be valuable.

Translating nuclear risk into formats that command broader attention from policymakers and publics requires more than white papers, it requires experiences that make the stakes feel real. In the Cold War era and the unipolar moment that followed this was generally movies and television. Today a different approach is required.

Reality TV, short form video content, and interactive AI-driven video games provide possible mediums that could bring nuclear risk back into the mainstream zeitgeist. A reality TV show could be set in a crisis environment with strategic gameplay that rewards negotiation, deception, and coalition-building under pressure. The entertainment industry has proven it can turn complex systems into compelling television: Survivor taught an entire generation game theory concepts without ever naming them, and The West Wing brought legislative procedure to an entire generation.

The same logic applies to public communication. Science communicators like Derek Muller of Veritasium have demonstrated that genuinely complex technical material can command millions of views when presented with clarity and personality. There is no structural reason the same cannot be true of nuclear policy, only a failure of imagination about who the audience is and how to reach them.

An AI-driven nuclear crisis simulation, made to be played on mobile devices in which players assume the role of a senior official navigating a live nuclear crisis, could be utilized as a tool to bring awareness of nuclear issues into the mainstream, and more broadly educate policymakers who do not engage normally with nuclear risk. The same underlying simulation could be tiered: a streamlined public-facing version that serves the broader awareness goal, and deeper version for congressional staff and agency personnel. The International Committee of the Red Cross has used game mechanics explicitly for humanitarian law education with measurable improvements in retention over traditional training, and experimental wargaming focused on AI-nuclear risks has begun to attract serious institutional interest. There is no structural reason the same approach cannot be extended to nuclear crisis literacy more broadly.

In addition to bringing wider awareness to nuclear risk, those working on nuclear policy must expand its geographic and institutional base beyond policymakers inside the Beltway. While nuclear issues, especially those pertaining to military and international relations, will always be a federal responsibility, state and local governments with historical ties to nuclear testing, accidents, or waste storage have an important role in expanding nuclear awareness. Communities in New Mexico, Nevada, and Pennsylvania possess lived experiences that can inform policy and serve as foundations for grassroots advocacy. New Mexico and Nevada both have an envious history of nuclear testing and Pennsylvania witnessed the most serious nuclear accident in U.S. history at Three Mile Island in 1979.

The renewal of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in 2025, a federal program providing financial redress to communities exposed to radiation from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing and uranium mining operations, illustrates the potential. That renewal came only after sustained advocacy by affected communities in the rural American West and among Indigenous populations, groups whose persistent pressure over years ultimately moved a measure that had stalled repeatedly in Congress. It is a model for how subnational voices can shape national policy when they organize effectively, particularly on nuclear issues.

Allies in Knowledge

Finally, the United States need not shoulder the burden of preserving knowledge of nuclear risk alone. Close allies, including France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, have both a stake in a stable nuclear order and the capacity to contribute meaningfully to its intellectual infrastructure through expansion and increased awareness. These countries can help support nuclear scholarship and expertise within their own borders and in partnership with the United States. Strategic investments in transnational academic exchanges, fellowships, and joint research can serve not only to preserve knowledge, but to shape the direction of nuclear discourse in ways that reflect shared interests and values.

The geopolitical and domestic conditions that have led to the current state of affairs are unlikely to change overnight. But nuclear weapons and the risks they pose are not going away, and their role in global affairs may become more central in years ahead even as they recede from view. This is not guaranteed to translate into resources. The nuclear policy community competes for attention and funding against fields that carry an air of immediate operational relevance. With the world order so uncertain there is an increased opportunity for US allies to steer the conversation and policy around nuclear risk in their own countries and in the United States, using traditional means and those mentioned previously in this article.

Competition for funding and resources is not going away either, and the nuclear community would be mistaken to simply wait it out. A more instructive precedent exists within the field’s own history: after the Cold War ended and nuclear issues lost their central place in security debates, arms control scholars who rebranded their expertise around nonproliferation, connecting their work to the immediate challenge of preventing new states and non-state actors from acquiring nuclear weapons, managed to sustain funding and institutional relevance through the 1990s and 2000s even as the broader field contracted. The lesson is not that nuclear policy should abandon its core concerns, but that framing matters: communities that connect their expertise to problems decision-makers already worried about survive; those that wait to be rediscovered do not.

With the world order undergoing profound and unpredictable changes it is more important than ever that the public, and those making policy, keep nuclear risk at the top of their minds. That engagement must be reshaped and brought back into the wider understanding of the public and policymakers. Yet, in many ways nuclear risk is better situated than other fields. There is a large body of institutional knowledge that still exists for nuclear risk, and while it may no longer be top of mind in public awareness, it never left completely. As nuclear issues come back into the news through events in Iran, China, and Russia, the first steps to bringing nuclear risk back into mainstream awareness are already being undertaken.

Spencer Gross joined the Pacific Forum Young Leaders Program in 2022 and lives in Los Angeles. The views expressed here are solely his own and do not represent the views of any organization.

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