Executive Director John Tierney spoke with The Progressive Magazine about factors that are impacting the lack of focus on today’s worsening arms race.
- The end of the Cold War with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and a series of treaties that reduced the number of nuclear warheads worldwide from more than 70,000 to 12,500 today. “I think the public attitude was that it was behind us,” said John Tierney, a former Congressmember who heads the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “And other interests came up—the Vietnam War, the Iraq [and] Afghanistan War[s], Black Lives Matter, economic inequality, women’s rights. All of these things were competing for the public interest. And they sort of assumed that this nuclear thing was no longer a problem, was under control, or moving in the right direction.”
- The last Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors are dying, and with them the power of their stories. So too are the peace activists of the 1960s and 1970s. Every week, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation receives messages from loved ones of long-time supporters asking to take them off its lists because they have died, admits Tierney. “Others are on a fixed income and older and not able to be as engaged as they were,” he says.
- Nuclear Armageddon is not as visible in popular culture as it was in the days of On the Beach (1959), Dr. Strangelove (1964), or The Day After (1983)—movies that “helped you imagine what a nuclear war might be like,” Knopf says. Oppenheimer (2023), while winning multiple Academy Awards, was a history piece, sealed in the amber of World War II—not the start of the Cold War nor today’s arms race. Without these widely viewed, emotional movies, nuclear activists struggle with communicating the threat. “This is not an issue like education or hospitals, health care, things like that where people just know what you’re talking about,” says Tierney. “If they haven’t been engaged in the issue, you first have to spend a considerable amount of time explaining these very complex issues in order to engage them and have them become full supporters.”
