Before I settled on becoming a medievalist I was really into Cold War history. While on a between-junior-and-senior-year-of-high-school-great-American-famil y-roadtrip I forced my parents to stop at every SAC command and Space Race oriented museum within 100 miles of our route, and even convinced my dad to drive up as far as you could get to the edge of an active missile silo (this is back in the 90s.). Seeing the buildings and planes brings it all home that it was real, the threat of nuclear war was a real thing and a real fear for the whole damn world.

FYI you can still drive right up to the fence on 450 active minutemen silos scattered over the Montana, North Dakota, and Colorado/Wyoming/Nebraska prairie- many within spitting distance of interstate highways. The coordinates are on Wikipedia, most are surprised at how not secret they actually are.

I was raised on Reagan, but was pretty young to really understand. It didn't stop me from freaking when I saw the day after tomorrow.

Checked out every book on chemistry, atoms, nuclear energy that I could get my 9 year old hands on, no easy task. It sure gave me a head start in high school science classes.. but did nothing to alleviate the dread.

the day after... not the climate change one.

My parents lived through the height of the cold war and told me all about how absolutely shit-releasingly terrifying the Cuban Missile crisis was. We also live in East TN pretty close to Oak Ridge, so it's one of main targets they would hit.
Oh, and has anyone heard that report about all the near nuclear catastrophes we've had? This journalist did a FOIA on it and there have been literally thousands of close calls.

I think the best way for it all to end for the human race is by way of a blatantly foolish mistake. We're only human after all.

There have been over 30 true broken arrows, most plane crashes or nukes falling out of planes or missiles detonating in silos. If you count "bent spears" which is more of the "dropped the bomb off the forklift and dented it" variety you are up in the hundreds of incidents. And the vast majority of those happened in a span of the late 50's where we could not keep enough new, hastily designed planes flying in the air 24/7 just in case, and unsurprisingly that ups the accident ratio quite a bit. None of them were potential nuclear catastrophes, even Goldsboro despite what some excitable people think, and all that information was public way before Eric Scholsser stuck his nose in it.

Even a dent is pretty concerning for me if there's 100kilotons attached to it. You are probably right, but I'm just saying.