I struggled to make the connection between that and what I had just shown her. Madeline added flatly, "A whole day of actual anxiety because of that news."
"You're going to be fine," I said, far too quickly. "You're healthy and, even if you get the flu, you'll survive just fine."
Then I slowed down. Of course, she was anxious. There was plenty to be anxious about in this Trumpian world of ours. Masked men in the streets, pulling some people out of cars through broken windows and shooting others in broad daylight. Tear gas, blockades, and crying kids on the nightly news (which we still watch sometimes).
But her fear of a flu shot and the flu she might still get was the right-sized fear for a sixth grader. Flagrant fascism, paramilitary violence, naked racism: those are massive fears for the preteen mind, as large as her mother's fixation on nuclear war.
I need to tread carefully here, I thought, since panic and fear are contagious and erode rationality. Panic and fear cause isolation and paranoia. And while no one should panic about nuclear weapons, I thought, there's certainly plenty to be afraid of. So, I pulled her a little closer to me, while remembering a professor at Rutgers who estimated that even a regional nuclear war would have a staggering global impact.
As a group of authors wrote in Nature Food in 2022, "In a nuclear war, bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet."
Such an upside-down atomic version of climate change would have a widespread impact on agriculture globally, leading to massive famines. They estimated that more than two billion people might die from a "limited" nuclear war between long-time nuclear rivals India and Pakistan.
What Can You Do in 85 Seconds?
Brutal, right? I chose to keep that information to myself in the bleachers at that swimming pool. The flu shot, not global famine, I thought to myself. Stay right-sized in this conversation with her.
But my little girl moves fast and she makes connections -- and she's fascinated by time. She's worn a watch forever and always wants to know how long something will take. ("When?" is her favorite question.) So, it was no surprise to me that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists clock fascinated her.
"85 seconds is not a long time, Mom. I mean, look," and she made a quick little circle with her hand. "That's like 85 seconds, so what does it mean that we're 85 seconds to midnight?"
"Well," I began, my voice suddenly breaking as I imagined the hellscapes of Hiroshima, those grim graphs in the Nature Food paper, and my daughter's future.
"No, Mom," she said. (She didn't want my big emotions.) "Just tell me what happens when we get to midnight."
"Well," I began again, "if we hit midnight on their clock, that is the end of the world as we know it."
"But that isn't going to happen, right, Mom?" She replied with her usual firm confidence that I always admire and am invariably curious about, wondering where it comes from.
"It hasn't happened yet, love," was the best I could muster. "And the reason it hasn't happened is that so many people all over the world all the time are resisting, pushing back, passing legislation, holding up signs, making documentaries, urging divestment from nuclear-related corporations, being creative and brave, calling for disarmament in every language we human beings speak."
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