Countdown to Doomsday.

In the early 1980s the specter of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union began to haunt the public consciousness more forcefully than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Warning of "the Soviet military threat," and calling the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the world," President Ronald Reagan presided over a $1.5 trillion military buildup that pointedly included new generations of nuclear weapons. At the same time, the Soviet Union continued to add aggressively to its own nuclear arsenal. In the United States defense officials spoke of fighting a "protracted" nuclear war, while military strategists suggested nuclear war was "winnable." Periodically during these years, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its "Doomsday Clock," which represents the statistical probability of nuclear war, closer and closer to midnight. In a 1983 Gallup poll 40 percent of the respondents thought it...