With the end of the New Start treaty, we face a potentially catastrophic arms race. It can still be prevented

The risk of nuclear war is greater now than in decades – and rising. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently set its famous Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, indicating a level of risk equivalent to the 1980s, when US and Soviet nuclear stockpiles were increasing rapidly. In those years, massive waves of disarmament protest arose in Europe and the United States. Political leaders responded, the cold war ended, and many people stopped worrying about the bomb.

Today, the bomb is back. Political tensions are rising, and nuclear weapons have spread to other countries, including Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. China is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal. The US-Russia arms competition may accelerate soon with the expiration on 5 February of the last remaining arms control agreement, the New Start treaty. To prevent the growing nuclear threat, we need a new global peace movement.

David Cortright, a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, was the executive director of Sane, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, during the 1980s