Verified by 
Key points
- Putin's nuclear threat poses the possibility of apocalypse by our own hands.
- We respond to nuclear threat with psychic numbing; while it diminshes panic, it can prevent us from finding an appropriate response.
- How we talk to children about nuclear threat can't be separated from how we talk to adults; children need free expression of their fears.
Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons awakens the imagery of extinction the bombs create, as first experienced by Hiroshima survivors. In this post, Charles Strozier and I explore nuclear fear in adults and children and the degree to which a measure of such fear may be appropriate to the threat. Strozier is a historian and psychoanalyst who has collaborated with me in a study of nuclear fear and has worked on related apocalyptic issues.
STROZIER: Putin’s repeated nuclear threats bring the notion of the human project ending into our conscious awareness in ways we have not experienced since 1945. The reality of such an apocalypse at our own hands has led to erratic psychological efforts to keep the threat more or less at bay. The threat is once again upon us in ways that can’t be denied.
LIFTON: The first thing to say is that we are terrified. We feel vulnerable to the most extreme instruments of destruction and killing ever created. This reactivated fear could be viewed as nuclear panic. That panic quickly gives way to a struggle over feeling and not feeling—with what I call psychic numbing.
In response to recent Russian nuclear threats, all of us are likely to call forth some form of such numbing, which is likely to help us to diminish our nuclear panic but in no way eliminates our fear and anxiety.
STROZIER: The problem with numbing, it seems, is that it works erratically in a psychological sense. The fears are not gone, only held off temporarily. It takes continual work to maintain numbing.
LIFTON: One of the big problems for us is our lack of prior images to call forth in relation to nuclear threat. If I am threatened with physical harm, there quickly comes to mind earlier experiences of that threat as a basis for fighting back or fleeing or surrendering to it. But we have no prior image for destruction of humankind. It is one thing for a prophet like H.G. Wells to imagine an end-of-the-world nuclear attack in a novel and quite another for what felt like just that to have actually occurred, as it did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No wonder that atomic bomb survivors told me of experiencing an immediate cessation of feeling—a “closing” or “shutting down” of the mind.
With accounts of what happened in those two cities and the later creation of infinitely more powerful hydrogen bombs, that sense of potential destruction of humanity extended throughout the world. The threats by Putin have reactivated that fear and also the widespread inclination to turn away from the entire subject.
Psychic numbing can protect one from that unmanageable threat, at least temporarily. But when psychic numbing is sustained it can itself become dangerous in preventing us from experiencing and responding to an all too real threat.
STROZIER: There have been periodic moments in the history of the nuclear age when full awareness of the dangers we face have surfaced, breaking through the numbing. The problem has always been that then we lose touch once again with the full meaning of ending human life.
LIFTON: Ever since the weapons appeared, we have been struggling with that question. The large antinuclear movements of the early 1980s expressed an insistence that we break through our numbing and attend to the threat by reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons and finding means of preventing their use.
STROZIER: One specific issue all of us face is how to share the knowledge of nuclear threat with the next generation, that is, how to talk about it with children. There are no simple answers here.
LIFTON: All that is part of the larger question of how we deal psychologically with the threat in general. The way we talk to our children about it is inseparable from how we, as adults, talk to each other, how we are coping with it. I think we learn more about ourselves as we try to talk to children.
There is no exact formula for talking to children—no set of rules about engaging or not engaging in the conversation—it doesn’t work that way. As with parenting in general, there has to be a give and take and a sharing of feelings. Children need to be allowed full expression of whatever fear they may have and not subjected to adults’ tendency to negate it because of their own intolerance for it. And for that to happen, we have to allow ourselves to experience our own fear and to recognize that a certain amount of nuclear fear is not only inevitable but necessary.
Part of the problem is that we do not like our children to be frightened. There is often the assumption that we have to somehow protect them from awareness of nuclear danger. But children are very quick at general feelings that have to do with that danger. They sense it in their parents and talk about it to each other.
Of course we need to discuss it with them in ways appropriate for their age. But we do well to keep in mind that children struggle with the idea of death in general as early as the age of three or even two, and they have the need to go on doing so in one way or another as they grow older. Indeed, concentrating on an exact age at which a child can be exposed to difficult topics can be adults’ way of avoiding their own fear of nuclear bombs. For both adults and children, nuclear fear is a disturbing extension of an overall struggle with death.
STROZIER: Those are interesting points. Death is the one absolute for all humans. We feel we live on symbolically in our children, in our work, our communities, and in other ways. We can share that hope with children. The problem is that nuclear weapons could end a human future itself. That is more difficult to talk about.
LIFTON: Yes, the danger is real, which is why I emphasize that a certain amount of nuclear fear is appropriate. That fear is necessary for us because without it—with sustained numbing—we are less able to act wisely in response to nuclear threat.
Nuclear fear becomes most manageable when it is channeled into collective action that combats the threat, as expressed in antinuclear movements, which, by definition, also provide hope in their advocacy of controlling or eliminating the weapons.
Children can also grasp at an early age that interaction of threat and proposed solution.
STROZIER: Children are the future and we owe them life at the very least. Our conversation with children must evolve out of our honest discussion with ourselves.
LIFTON: When we talk with our children we are beginning a generational dialogue and making the assumption that there will be future generations. I’m now attempting to finish a short book on catastrophe and survival, where I emphasize immediate Hiroshima survivors as a source of an anti-nuclear legacy that extends into the future. Generations following our children can benefit from that legacy by exploring their own fear and struggle with nuclear issues of their particular time.
STROZIER: The further complication of nuclear threat is that it merges with the dangers of totalistic climate change or with biological threats such as Covid-19.
LIFTON: I believe that nuclear has become the model for other world-ending threats, including climate change and Covid-19. The mind tends to merge all such threats into one overall perception of the potential end of human life.
In various antinuclear movements, we used the rhetoric of the “nuclear end.” You recall the research that you and I did in the late 1980s, in which we understood ourselves to be studying the nuclear threat in different groups of the American population. But people associated back and forth between nuclear and climate threats, referring to one in the same paragraph or sentence or phrase as the other. At that time they were becoming more conscious of climate danger, but the nuclear threat did not go away and still provided the basic image of world destruction.
STROZIER: The timing is crucial here. Nuclear threat is sudden, absolute, and immediate. Other threats unfold over a longer period and in an unpredictable way. That changes the meaning of history in the nuclear age, and of course we will now never not be in the nuclear age.
LIFTON: Yes, one split second in time, and the world is gone. Climate threat is very much upon us but still plays itself out over decades and even centuries. Similarly, Covid-19 is all-enveloping in its sicknesses and deaths, but the survivor groups that emerge from it require time to form and express their views. What we call nuclear winter, in which the debris from a certain explosive power would block out the rays of the sun and render earth too cold to be habitable, is faster, and more decisive.
STROZIER: Perhaps the scientific understanding of nuclear winter brings a measure of hope to this grim subject of our conversation. It helps us face the danger more rationally.
LIFTON: The hope lies in a collective response that confronts these threats rather than one of numbed rejection or denial. That response can enable us to imagine the end of the world in order to preserve it.
Charles B. Strozier is a historian and psychoanalyst who has written extensively on the psychology of fundamentalism and other apocalyptic issues, aspects of the history of psychoanalysis, and psychological studies of Abraham Lincoln.
