As 2023's Oppenheimer breathed life back into cinema, it also reflected the death of decades of nuclear calm. Less headline-worthy was this week's International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. But what place does pacifism have in this playground of megalomaniac male rulers we live in?

Since Vladimir Putin illegally invaded Ukraine, his threats of employing nuclear violence to keep NATO at bay have spawned UK and US op-eds locked into Cold War logic: that an effective deterrent is an aggressive one.

Kim Jong Un's provocative intercontinental ballistic missile tests, and Donald Trump's collapsing of multiple arms control agreements including the Iran Nuclear Deal, not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu's remorseless existentialism, has set forward Oppenheimer's Doomsday Clock to "90 seconds to midnight". The closest to catastrophe we have ever been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYPbbksJxIg

These ruptures mean more and more mentions of nukes in our news. But while this quantity of coverage is new to our generation, its nature replicates that of generations before.

The US frames its nuclear 'deterrent' as responsible for world peace, using euphemistic language to keep the unimaginably awful to the blissfully unimaginable. Terms like 'nuclear exchange' instead of 'nuclear warfare', as if we're trading Top Trumps rather than mutually-assured-destruction.

In North Korea, nukes are portrayed as patriotic achievements; in Iran, as peaceful projects exposing Western hypocrites who demand others disarm while they do not; in Russia, they are NATO's ultimate humiliation.

Here in the UK, nuclear weapons are a fact of life, a necessity we politely ignore but patriotically cling to as undebated (except for a few squabbles over expenses) relics of an increasingly irrelevant superpower.

Counter voices are dismissed as naïve. Prospective prime ministers are cornered by reporters to answer whether they would "push the button". "No" cues electoral annihilation; "yes" cues no further questions.

This tells us more than just how geopolitically biased journalists are. It points to a conversation coloured by state secrecy, blood money, and most of all the ignorance of everyone involved.

The debate is dictated by political voices, while humanitarian and scientific voices are laughed out. Which is why we invited a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a Japanese peace activist into the Media Storm studio.

How different would the conversation be if survivors had a say? In Japan, author and activist Yumiko Sakuma told us Oppenheimer was widely criticised for omitting visuals of the agonies faced by victims, in what director Christopher Nolan justified as a bid for character subjectivity.

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"We actively avoid talking about real human suffering," she said. Worse still, Warner Bros' embrace of 'Barbenheimer' memes, transposing Barbie characters onto nuclear-mushroom backdrops, was taken as evidence that nuclear war means little more to many than money and entertainment.

"We're living in a time where survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are leaving us one by one," said Yumiko, holding up a small ceramic vase she owns, excruciatingly contorted in perfect replication of an item retrieved from Hiroshima's wreckage. "But we know what radiation does, it's not abstract."

Yet there are shortcomings even with survivor accounts, added physicist Dr Ira Helfand, because "they don't begin to prepare us for what would happen today". With modern nuclear technology, there would not be survivor accounts.

In eight terrifying minutes on the podcast, Ira recounted what nuclear war would actually look like. Strategic major cities like London, Moscow and New York would be targeted with between 10 and 20 warheads, each six to 50 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

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