Fear of Nuclear War

That is an unusually candid position and it governs everything below. What follows is a body of findings from one decade, about one historical situation, which cannot be repeated.

What Newcomb's nuclear questionnaire measured

Michael D. Newcomb built the Nuclear Attitudes Questionnaire in 1986 to assess the opinions and fears of 722 young adults about nuclear power plants and weapons. Fifteen scaled items sorted the answers into four things:

• concern about nuclear matters
• support for them
• fear of what is coming
• refusal to think about any of it

The available responses were agreement, disagreement, or don't know.

Nuclear denial as a measured construct is the interesting inclusion. An instrument that scores not thinking about it alongside worrying about it is measuring a range of responses rather than an intensity of one.

Where the threat came top of the list

Nuclear threat was identified as the biggest concern among northern European students, and as the second or third biggest among North American students in 1986. Ontario students named it above everything else in 1985, and so did Finnish children and teenagers in a national survey that year. It was a source of anxiety in countries far from either superpower, with Colombian youth given as an example.

Whether the surveys created the nuclear fear they measured

Joseph Adelson and Chester E. Finn Jr. challenged the whole finding in a 1985 article titled Terrorizing Children, accusing the political left of spreading fear among children for political ends. They made two claims and both were checkable:

• children had not shown much of this before anyone had a name for it
• the instruments used to detect it worked by putting nuclear weapons in front of young people again and again, which is how the fear got there

The second claim is a real methodological point about any survey of a fear. Asking somebody how worried they are about a thing requires raising the thing.

The piece caused an argument and was judged not to be science. Their criticism of the American Psychological Association's programmes called them a fifty-ring circus led by luminaries of the Left, and they questioned the credibility of the researchers and journals publishing the evidence.

A different line of attack held that the anxiety belonged to affluent white children with room in their lives for it, since children of colour and poorer children had more immediate things pressing on them. Other researchers examined both the fear-mongering and the social conditioning arguments and found no correlation between nuclear anxiety, political preference and social class.

Where nuclear concern turns into despair

The most useful finding in the material is a threshold. Kept at the level of concern, the worry seldom does measurable harm to mental health. Worry at the level of despair has effects on mental health that remain stable over time, and which subjects can live with.

The same threshold divides the political consequences. Greater interest in political processes is likely for people whose anxiety does not exceed concern. Those in despair may support disarmament and withdraw from politics, out of distrust toward governments and anti-nationalistic feeling.

Nuclear anxiety correlates with greater opposition to armament and with a desire to act, and people who believe survival in a nuclear war is unlikely or impossible are likely to turn to antinuclear activism.

What happens when a parent denies the nuclear threat

Where a parent refuses to accept that the threat exists, or that the child's anxiety does, the consequences get worse.

That is a specific and actionable result, and it belongs beside the inclusion of nuclear denial as a construct in Newcomb's instrument. Denial was measured in the young people and observed in the adults, and in the adults it made things worse.

How nuclear anxiety affected mental health

The catalogue of reported effects runs long. Anxiety and stress. Helplessness and hopelessness. Constant worry. A sense that nothing means anything. Depression, more drug use, less satisfaction with life. Feelings of worthlessness, loneliness and alienation, low self-esteem, and among the young a stalling of ordinary development. Among teenagers it correlated with getting into trouble.

One study found men less inclined to report anxiety and more inclined to deny the threat, which the author attributed to machismo. Satisfaction with life came out lower in the women and drug use higher in the men.

When nuclear anxiety had its political moment

Margaret Mead viewed the anxiety in the 1960s as a violent survivalist impulse that should instead be channelled toward recognising the need for peace.

The term itself belongs to the post-detente 1980s, and the political moment can be dated. On 20 September 1983 two adolescents told Congress of their fears of nuclear war, at an event hosted by the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families. The American Orthopsychiatric Association ran programmes on nuclear anxiety in children. Walter Mondale spoke of the nuclear nightmares experienced by American youth during his 1984 election campaign.

The article notes the fear returning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli-American war with Iran, which is the first period since the 1980s in which the question could be asked again. The comparison runs sideways as well as forward: Eco-Anxiety in young adults is likened in its own literature to the fear of nuclear annihilation felt by an earlier generation, and radiophobia holds the other half of the subject, exposure and what it does to a body rather than the event and what it does to everybody.