In 1992, I walked around the test site where the first atomic device had been suspended in a steel tower above the desert sands and scrub brush.

It’s an eerie landscape; the tower, of course, is gone, obliterated in the atomic blast.

You can still find sand that’s been fused solid by the blast and, yes, it’s still radioactive.

What we didn’t know clearly during most of the Cold War is that any “major” nuclear war involving just a fraction of the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia would likely generate a nuclear winter, leading to widespread famine across the globe.

It will not be millions of people being killed in two countries—but billions across the globe.

A nuclear war could end us as a civilization and perhaps as a species as well. Why then do we persist in building yet more missiles and bombs?

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