In these final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, U.S. voters’ attention is being consumed by a maelstrom of crises — a merciless pandemic, a battered economy, a society ruptured by racist police violence and deadly structural inequalities, climate chaos and a fragile democracy.

Who has time to worry about nuclear war?

But just as warnings of a climate crisis and pandemics have been borne out, experts have long sounded the alarm about nuclear weapons, whether their use is triggered by impulse, accident or miscalculation.