Alex WellersteinVerified account

Thanks. I do, depending on the context, try to steer into questions that I wish people were asking — e.g., whether the cost of modernization is justified, what else we could spend the money on. But it doesn't always happen and it rarely makes it into a final piece.

I suspect the reason for that is because the boat on "thinking about the costs of war" sailed a long time ago, and it now sounds like something that tired bearded hippies sing about. (It shouldn't be read that way, but in the USA, I think it is.)

But the one thing I would push back on: I don't think talking about the possibility of nuclear use is a totally privileged discussion. I mean, the outcomes would be bad for the unprivileged as well — arguably disproportionately so.

(FWIW, I have a student doing research on this at the moment. There is almost no literature on it in the nuke field, but there is in other disaster response fields. I have been tempted to suggest her call the paper, "Fallout Shelters So White.")

I don't think it has to be an either/or thing — we either talk about the possibility of a nuclear detonation, or we talk about systemic violence and poverty. This seems like a false choice to me (and there is journalism about the latter, to be sure).