The photograph was taken from cockpit of a U-2 spy plane as it flew above alleged surveillance balloon on February 3.

During the Cold War, NATO had nightmares of hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s troops pouring across international borders and igniting a major ground war with a democracy in Europe. Western governments feared that such a move by the Kremlin would lead to escalation—first to a world war and perhaps even to a nuclear conflict.

That was then; this is now.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is nearly a year old, and the Ukrainians are holding on. The Russians, so far, not only have been pushed back, but are taking immense casualties and material losses. For many Americans, the war is now just another conflict in the news. Do we need to worry about the nuclear threat of Putin’s war in Europe the way we worried about such things three decades ago?

Our staff writer Tom Nichols, an expert on nuclear weapons and the Cold War, counsels Americans not to be obsessed with nuclear escalation, but to be aware of the possibilities for accidents and miscalculations. You can hear his thoughts here:

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Tom Nichols: It’s been a year since the Russians invaded Ukraine and launched the biggest conventional war in Europe since the Nazis. One of the things that I think we’ve all worried about in that time is the underlying problem of nuclear weapons.

This is a nuclear-armed power at war with hundreds of thousands of people in the middle of Europe. This is the nightmare that American foreign policy has dreaded since the beginning of the nuclear age.

And I think people have kind of put it out of their mind, how potentially dangerous this conflict is, which is understandable, but also, I think, takes us away from thinking about something that is really the most important foreign problem in the world today.

During the Cold War, we would’ve thought about that every day, but these days, people just don’t think about it, and I think they should.

My name is Tom Nichols. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. For 25 years, I was a professor of national-security affairs at Naval War College.

For this episode of Radio Atlantic, I want to talk about nuclear weapons and what I think we should have learned from the history of the Cold War about how to think about this conflict today.

I was aware of nuclear weapons at a pretty young age because my hometown, Chicopee, Massachusetts, was home to a giant nuclear-bomber base, Strategic Air Command’s East Coast headquarters, which had the big B-52s that would fly missions with nuclear weapons directly to the Soviet Union.

I had a classic childhood of air-raid sirens, and hiding in the basement, and going under the desks, and doing all of that stuff. My high-school biology teacher had a grim sense of humor and told us, you know, because of the Air Force base, we were slated for instant destruction. He said, Yeah, if anything ever happens, we’re gone. We’re gone in seven or eight minutes. So I guess the idea of nuclear war and nuclear weapons was a little more present in my life at an earlier age than for a lot of other kids.

It’s been a long time since anyone’s really had to worry about global nuclear war. It’s been over 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think people who lived through the Cold War were more than happy to forget about it. I know I am glad to have it far in the past. And I think younger people who didn’t experience it have a hard time understanding what it was all aboutand what that fear was about—because it’s part of ancient history now.

But I think people really need to understand that Cold War history to understand what’s going on today, and how decision makers in Washington and in Europe, and even in Moscow, are playing out this war—because many of these weapons are still right where we left them.

We have fewer of them, but we still have thousands of these weapons, many of them on a very short trigger. We could go from the beginning of this podcast to the end of the world, that short of [a] time. And it’s easy to forget that. During the Cold War, we were constantly aware of it, because it was the central influence on our foreign policy. But it’s important for us to look back at the history of the Cold War because we survived a long and very tense struggle with a nuclear-armed opponent. Now, some of that was through good and sensible policy. And some of it was just through dumb luck.

Of course, the first big crisis that Americans really faced where they had to think about the existential threat of nuclear weapons was the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962.

I was barely 2 years old. But living next to this big, plump nuclear target in Massachusetts, we actually knew people in my hometown who built fallout shelters. But we got through the Cuban missile crisis, in part because President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev realized what was at stake.

The gamble to put missiles in Cuba had failed, and that we had to—as Khruschev put it in one of his messages—we had to stop pulling on the ends of the rope and tightening the knot of war. But we also got incredibly lucky.

There was a moment aboard a Soviet submarine where the sub commander thought they were under attack. And he wanted to use nuclear-tipped torpedoes to take out the American fleet, which would’ve triggered a holocaust.

I mean, it would’ve been an incredible amount of devastation on the world. Tens, hundreds of millions of people dead. And, um, fortunately a senior commander who had to consent to the captain’s idea vetoed the whole thing. He said, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t think they’re trying to sink us, and I do not consent. And so by this one lucky break with this one Soviet officer, we averted the end of the world. I mean, we averted utter catastrophe.

After the Cuban missile crisis, people are now even more aware of this existential threat of nuclear weapons and it starts cropping up everywhere, especially in our pop culture. I mean, they were always there in the ’50s; there were movies about the communist threat and attacks on America. But after the Cuban missile crisis, that’s when you start getting movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe.

Both were about an accidental nuclear war, which becomes a theme for most of the Cold War. In Dr. Strangelove, an American general goes nuts and orders an attack on Russia. And in Fail Safe, a piece of machinery goes bad and the same thing happens. And I think this reflected this fear that we now had to live with, this constant threat of something that we and the Soviets didn’t even want to do, but could happen anyway.

Even the James Bond movies, which were supposed to be kind of campy and fun, nuclear weapons were really often the source of danger in them. You know, bad guys were stealing them; people were trying to track our nuclear submarines. Throughout the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s nuclear weapons really become just kind of soaked into our popular culture.

We all know the Cuban missile crisis because it’s just part of our common knowledge about the world, even for people that didn’t live through it. I think we don’t realize how dangerous other times were. I always think of 1983 as the year we almost didn’t make it.

1983 was an incredibly tense year. President Ronald Reagan began the year calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” And announced that the United States would start pouring billions of dollars into an effort to defend against Soviet missiles, including space-based defenses, which the Soviets found incredibly threatening.

The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union had just completely broken down. Really, by the fall of 1983, it felt like war was inevitable. It certainly felt like to me war was inevitable. There was kind of that smell of gunpowder in the air. We were all pretty scared. I was pretty scared. I was a graduate student at that point. I was 23 years old, and I was certain that this war, this cataclysmic war, was going to happen not only in my lifetime, but probably before I was 30 years old.

And then a lot of things happened in 1983 that elevated the level of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union to extraordinary levels. I would say really dangerous levels. The Soviets did their best to prove they were an evil empire by shooting down a fully loaded civilian airliner, killing 269 people. Just weeks after the shoot-down of the Korean airliner, Soviet Air Defenses got an erroneous report of an American missile launch against them. And this is another one of those cases where we were just lucky. We were just fortunate.

And in this case, it was a Soviet Air Defense officer, a lieutenant colonel, who saw this warning that the Americans had launched five missiles. And he said, You know, nobody starts World War III with five missiles. That seems wrong.

And he said, I just, I think the system—which still had some bugs—I just don’t think the system’s right. We’re gonna wait that out. We’re gonna ignore that. He was actually later reprimanded.

It was almost like he was reprimanded and congratulated at the same time, because if he had called Moscow and said, Look, I’m doing my duty. I’m reporting Soviet Air Defenses have seen American birds are in the air. They’re coming at us and over to you, Kremlin. And from there, a lot of bad decisions could have cascaded into World War III, especially after a year where we had been in such amazingly high conflict with each other.

Once again, just as after the Cuban missile crisis, the increase in tension in the 1980s really comes through in the popular culture. Music, movies, TV puts this sense of threat into the minds of ordinary Americans in a way that we just don’t have now. So people are going to the movies and they’re seeing movies like WarGames, once again about an accidental nuclear war. They’re seeing movies like Red Dawn, about a very intentional war by the Soviet Union against the United States.

The Soviets thought that Red Dawn was actually part of Reagan’s attempt to use Hollywood to prepare Americans for World War III. In music, Ronald Reagan as a character made appearances in videos by Genesis or by Men at Work. That November, the biggest television event in history was The Day After, which was a cinematic representation of World War III.

I mean, it was everywhere. By 1983, ’84, we were soaked in this fear of World War III. Nuclear war and Armageddon, no matter where you looked. I remember in the fall of 1983 going to see the new James Bond movie, one of the last Roger Moore movies, called Octopussy. And the whole plot amazed me because, of course, I was studying this stuff at the time, I was studying NATO and nuclear weapons.

And here’s this opening scene where a mad Soviet general says, If only we can convince the West to give up its nuclear weapons, we can finally invade and take over the world.

I saw all of these films as either a college student or a young graduate student, and again, it was just kind of woven into my life. Well, of course, this movie is about nuclear war. Of course, this movie is about a Soviet invasion. Of course, this movie is about, you know, the end of the world, because it was always there. It was always in the background. But after the end of the Cold War, that remarkable amount of pop-culture knowledge and just general cultural awareness sort of fades away.

I think one reason that people today don’t look back at the Cold War with the same sense of threat is that it all ended so quickly. We went from [these] terrifying year[s] of 1983, 1984. And then suddenly Gorbachev comes in; Reagan reaches out to him; Gorbachev reaches back. They jointly agree in 1985—they issue a statement that to this day, is still considered official policy by the Russian Federation and by the United States of America. They jointly declare a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.

And all of a sudden, by the summer of 1985, 1986, it’s just over, and, like, 40 years of tension just came to an end in the space of 20, 24 months. Something I just didn’t think I would see in my lifetime. And I think that’s really created a false sense of security in later generations.

After the Cold War, in the ’90s we have a Russia that’s basically friendly to the United States but nuclear weapons are still a danger. For example, in 1995, Norway launched a scientific satellite on top of a missile—I think they were gonna study the northern lights—and the scientists gave everybody notice, you know, We’re gonna be launching this satellite. You’re gonna see a missile launch from Norway.

Somebody in Russia just didn’t get the message, and the Russian defense people came to President Boris Yeltsin and they said, This might be a NATO attack. And they gave him the option to activate and launch Russian nuclear weapons. Yeltsin conferred with his people, and fortunately—because our relations were good, and because Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton had a good relationship, and because tensions were low in the world—Yeltsin says, Yeah, okay. I don’t buy that. I’m sure it’s nothing.

But imagine again, if that had been somebody else.

And that brings us to today. The first thing to understand is: We are in a better place than we were during the Cold War in many ways. During the Cold War, we had tens of thousands of weapons pointed at each other. Now by treaty, the United States and the Russian Federation each have about 1,500 nuclear weapons deployed and ready to go. Now, that’s a lot of nuclear weapons, but 1,500 is a lot better than 30,000 or 40,000.

Nonetheless, we are dealing with a much more dangerous Russian regime with this mafia state led by Vladimir Putin.

Putin is a mafia boss. There is no one to stop him from doing whatever he wants. And he has really convinced himself that he is some kind of great world historical figure who is going to reestablish this Christian Slavic empire throughout the former Soviet Union and remnants of the old Russian empire. And that makes him uniquely dangerous.

People might wonder why Putin is even bothering with nuclear threats, because we’ve always thought of Russia as this giant conventional power because that’s the legacy of the Cold War. We were outnumbered. NATO at the time was only 16 countries. We were totally outnumbered by the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact in everything—men, tanks, artillery—and of course, the only way we could have repulsed an attack by the Soviet Union into Europe would’ve been to use nuclear weapons.

I know earlier I mentioned the movie Octopussy. We’ve come a long way from the days when that mad Russian general could say, If only we got rid of nuclear weapons and NATO’s nuclear weapons, we could roll our tanks from Czechoslovakia to Poland through Germany and on into France.

What people need to understand is that Russia is now the weaker conventional power. The Russians are now the ones saying, Listen, if things go really badly for us and we’re losing, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons. The difference between Russia now and NATO then is: NATO was threatening these nuclear weapons if they were invaded and they were being just rolled over by Soviet tanks on their way to the English channel. The Russians today are saying, We started this war, and if it goes badly for us, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons to get ourselves out of a jam.

This conventional weakness is actually what makes them more dangerous, because they’re now continually being humiliated in the field. And a country that had gotten by by convincing people that they were a great conventional power, that they had a lot of conventional capability, they’re being revealed now as a hollow power. They can’t even defeat a country a third of their own size.

And so when they’re running out of options, you can understand at that point where Putin says, Well, the only way to scramble the deck and to get a do-over here is to use some small nuclear weapon in that area to kind of sober everybody up and shock them into coming to the table or giving me what I want.

Now, I think that would be incredibly stupid. And I think a lot of people around the world, including China and other countries, have told Putin that would be a really bad idea. But I think one thing we’ve learned from this war is that Putin is a really lousy strategist who takes dumb chances because he’s just not very competent.

And that comes back to the Cold War lesson—that you don’t worry about someone starting World War III as much as you worry about bumbling into World War III because of a bunch of really dumb decisions by people who thought they were doing something smart and didn’t understand that they were actually doing something really dangerous.

So where does this leave us? This major war is raging through the middle of Europe, the scenario that we always dreaded during the Cold War; thousands and thousands of Moscow’s troops flooding across borders. What’s the right way to think about this? Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that this really is a war to defend democracy against an aggressive, authoritarian imperial state.

The front line of the fight for civilization, really, is in Ukraine now. If Ukraine loses this war, the world will be a very different place. That’s what makes it imperative that Americans think about this problem. I think it’s imperative to support Ukraine in this fight, but we should do that with a prudent understanding of real risks that haven’t gone away.

And so I think the Cold War provides some really good guidance here, which is to be engaged, to be aware, but not to be panicked. Not to become consumed by this fear every day, because that becomes paralyzing, that becomes debilitating. It’s bad for you as a person. And it’s bad for democracies’ ability to make decisions—because then you simply don’t make any decisions at all, out of fear.

I think it’s important not to fall victim to Cold War amnesia and forget everything we learned. But I also don’t think we should become consumed by a new Cold War paranoia where we live every day thinking that we’re on the edge of Armageddon.

The 2022 Ford Bronco Raptor, among the most expensive offering in the car manufacturer’s line of tough-guy throwback SUVs, features 418 horsepower, a 10-speed transmission, axles borrowed from off-road-racing vehicles, and 37-inch tires meant for driving off sand dunes at unnecessarily high speeds. But when the automotive site Jalopnik got its hands on a Bronco Raptor for testing, the writer José Rodríguez Jr. singled out something else entirely to praise about the $70,000 SUV: its buttons. The Bronco Raptor features an array of buttons, switches, and knobs controlling everything from its off-road lights to its four-wheel-drive mode to whatever a “sway bar disconnect” is. So much can be done by actually pressing or turning an object that Rodríguez Jr. found the vehicle’s in-dash touch screen—the do-it-all “infotainment system” that has become ubiquitous in new vehicles—nearly vestigial.

Then again, the ability to manipulate a physical thing, a button, has become a premium feature not just in vehicles, but on gadgets of all stripes. Although the cheapest models of the Amazon Kindle line are simple touch-screen slabs, the $250 Oasis features dedicated “Page Forward”/“Back” buttons, while the $370 version of the Kindle Scribe comes with a “premium pen” for note-taking that itself has a button. Or consider the Apple Watch, among the most expensive smartwatches around: All models come with a button and knob on their right side just below the bezel—plus a second button for the more expensive Ultra model. The bargain-bin knockoffs sold on Amazon, by contrast, offer nothing but a screen on a strap. Speaking of which, I recently bought an Amazon-brand smart thermostat with a touch screen that nearly burned my house down. Perhaps a dial, like the one on the primo Google Nest, could have helped.

There’s a reason the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew had touch screens way back in 1987: to remind you that it is a show that takes place in the future, which is where the touch screens are and buttons aren’t. At 33, I’m old enough to remember when my dad got a BlackBerry that had ditched its keyboard for a touch screen. Holding the device, with its translucent rubber cover and blank, reflective display, felt like cradling a new era. But although plenty of high-end gadgets, including the iPhone, are mostly screen, something seems to have changed in recent years. “It’s as if in the tech world it’s a sign of luxury: I have a button or a knob,” Douglas Rushkoff, a CUNY professor and the author of Survival of the Richest, told me. Of all things, buttons have seemed to become something like a status symbol in their own right.

For a while, gadgets without buttons were a technological marvel. The original iPhone, the journalist Brian Merchant writes in his book The One Device, introduced consumers to the wonders of capacitive touch screens, which, to grossly oversimplify things, turned our bodies into buttons, allowing us to interact with touch screens through movements such as swipes and multi-finger gestures. Packing as much utility as a manufacturer can into a screen means that developers can deliver new features and functionality even years after the physical product has shipped. This makes screens into blank canvases of possibility—little black mirrors that can serve as keyboards, TVs, gaming devices, periodicals, web browsers, and so much more.

But somewhere along the way, the touch screen peaked. High-end gizmos that might once have seemed primed to lose their buttons along with everything else have held out, unlike their cheaper alternatives. Think of mixers and samplers in the realm of music, DSLR cameras, or even video games, which have mostly remained so button-focused that you can buy be-buttoned thingamajigs that clamp onto your phone for mobile gaming. The new Sony Walkman, which has six buttons along its side in addition to an Android-enabled touch screen, can run up to $3,700.

In the simplest sense, perhaps buttons are back because they are inadvertent beneficiaries of the cyclical nature of trends, not unlike boot-cut jeans or low-top Air Force Ones. “There’s a fashionable thing of moving back towards analog,” says Alex Stein, a former project manager at Meta who conducted research into the relationship between device usage and class. After more than a decade and change of ubiquity, the touch screen doesn’t feel cutting-edge anymore. Having a device with lots of buttons is cool now—like mechanical keyboards and record players—because there just aren’t that many out there. We’re at the point where, as Stein told me, “Someone can get ‘status credit’ for discovering them again.”

But what makes buttons seem expensive is that they are expensive. The price of touch screens has plummeted as they have gone mainstream, while buttons require more parts and for programmers and physical designers to work together in real time. And a button can’t be updated the same way an app can—it’s got to be right the first time.

But more than anything else, the resurrection of buttons is a sign that we didn’t really appreciate them in the first place. When I told a friend I was writing this article, she exclaimed, “Ooh! I love buttons!” but struggled to explain exactly why. Maybe they’re just satisfying to our inner Cro-Magnon, always in search of something to mash. Which is a more satisfying experience: woozily tapping your phone to silence the alarm in the morning, or smacking the “Snooze” button on a clock radio? “Tangible, physical things elicit a deeper human response when they physically connect you to the action you’re taking,” says Brian Moore, an independent inventor and developer who has created such curiosities as a box that allows you to type the letters LOL only if you’ve actually laughed out loud.  

Moore suggested to me that one way to think about the resurgence of buttons is that they enforce what he calls “restructions,” or constructive restrictions, on our activities. “It’s about intentionally narrowing your options” in a do-everything world, he said. In a way, the presence of a button is a restruction in and of itself. It constrains our options in a way that lets us actually do what we want to do. For example, in Philadelphia, where I live, there exists not one but (at least) two vintage-typewriter stores, where customers (including Tom Hanks!) can find a refurbished IBM or Olympia that will offer a distraction-free, high-tactility writing experience—something people became willing to pay hundreds of dollars for once the coronavirus pandemic hit. On a typewriter, I wouldn’t be able to screw around like I can on a computer. When my livelihood depends on my ability to pump out words, a device that encourages that is worth money to me.

But therein lies the contradiction. “You have to pay for the privilege” of tactility, Rushkoff said. “That’s the way it’s always been. Buttons control the privilege. Hands-on is a privilege.” Wealthy people are able to most directly resist against the massive amounts of agency we’ve ceded to tech companies, who seemingly view every electronic object in our possession as a “surface” that can be integrated into larger, holistic systems. Buttons, meanwhile, represent an old-school sense of genuine control over our technology. A manual car or old TV set can have individual parts break yet still be usable, but to a certain extent, something like a smartphone is an all-or-nothing proposition. Single apps by and large don’t just stop working; more common are larger, physical issues, like a crack in a screen, that affect the usability of every app we’ve got. Buttons do one thing at any moment; they engage our muscle memory in a way that gives us a sense of mastery over a device. While president, Donald Trump had a button on his desk that, when pressed, meant someone had to bring him a Diet Coke. That’s true power in its dumbest possible form, and in a way, it’s what we all want.

But the return of buttons may not be here for good. As our devices become more integrated with one another, we’ll likely be forced to interact with more of them through touch screens and voice commands. After all, it’s better for the companies—even if it’s not for us. Car touch screens, for example, have been shown to require drivers to spend much more time performing simple mid-drive tasks such as changing the temperature than a buttons-and-knobs-based instrument panel does. And yet the “in-car infotainment” market is viewed as a growth area by industry researchers.

Like so much in tech, device design seems to be marching inexorably forward to a future that no one particularly wants. Perhaps years of swiping, tapping, and hunting through sub-menus has us nostalgic for the days when things were just a bit more complicated, a bit more real. Or, at least, willing to pay for a button that can help us pretend.

Nikki Haley is running for president. She is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the former governor of South Carolina. She is a savvy communicator and conservative. And she is a woman.

In 2023, thank goodness, Haley’s candidacy will not be defined by her sex—a credit to all the women who have run before and toppled expectations. And yet, Haley is the only woman to enter the 2024 presidential race so far, and that might remain the case. The fact of her sex will create opportunities and pitfalls—especially when it comes to the question of how she campaigns against the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump.

I saw a version of this dynamic play out eight years ago, when I ran Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign. Our biggest hurdle was getting attention in a crowded field of 16 other Republican candidates, all of whom were men. At the first GOP primary debate, in the summer of 2015, we were relegated to the “kiddy table,” a pre-prime-time event with the lowest-polling candidates. Fiorina was widely seen as the winner of the debate, but her performance was quickly eclipsed by the shadow that Trump cast. At that point, our only available strategy was as annoying as it was obvious: If we wanted to get noticed, we needed Trump to attack Fiorina.

That wasn’t going to be a problem. Trump has an odd relationship with women. Sure, he insults everyone he deems insufficiently loyal and deferential to him, regardless of gender. But women garner a special type of attention from him—sometimes positive, sometimes negative. His attacks on Megyn Kelly, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi stand out among many examples of how vicious he can be toward women; each of them has male colleagues and counterparts whom Trump more often ignored. At the same time, Trump also singles out women to promote and elevate—Elise Stefanik, Kari Lake, Pam Bondi. And I think we all know who Trump’s favorite kid is.

[Read: Inside Ivanka’s dreamworld]

This sets up a paradox for any female candidate running against Trump: You might get extra attention from him, and you might well need that attention. But his attacks can also underscore the fact that you are a woman, and add to the sexism you are already facing.

The old adage about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—that she did everything he did but backwards and in heels—also applies in politics. For starters, it’s literally true. At the second GOP debate in the 2016 race, when CNN built a scaffolded stage so that Air Force One could be in the background at the Reagan Library, the debate organizers had to figure out how to build Fiorina a separate women’s bathroom. To access it, she had to get down a grated-metal staircase, in heels, with pantyhose, all within a five-minute commercial break. She opted to hold it for the duration of the two-hour debate. More seriously, running for president as a woman is still harder than running as a man. Haley faces an electorate that has not yet proved that it’s ready to elect a woman president.

But there’s another side to the dancing metaphor that is often overlooked. There were more eyes on Ginger Rogers than on Fred Astaire. She had the flowy dress and the long legs and the blond hair; he had the black suit. In politics, as in life, whatever makes you different also lets you stand out. Women make up the majority of grocery shoppers, teachers, and PTA members, and those experiences affect how we think about economic issues and school curricula. For most of us, our views about public safety are informed by the fear we feel when walking to our car at night. Haley starts with a certain advantage over her male peers because she knows what it means to be a woman, and women make up the majority of American voters.

But Donald Trump.

In the fall of 2015, Trump was giving an interview to Rolling Stone when he saw Fiorina pop up on a nearby TV screen. “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!” he told the magazine. “I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not [supposed to] say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” Fiorina was asked about the quote during the Reagan Library debate, and although our campaign team had of course talked about Trump’s comments, we’d never rehearsed her answer. “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” she replied, to applause. It knocked Trump down for the rest of the debate. In response, he stammered out something about her being a “beautiful woman,” which made the moment even more cringeworthy.

It worked. Three days after the debate, Fiorina had jumped 12 points in the polls—she was now sitting in second place—and Trump had dropped eight points. Donations were pouring in. We suddenly felt like we had momentum. The problem was that she had been so effective against Trump that he never mentioned her name again. Our campaign spent the next six months drowning in his silence while the male candidates talked about the relative size of their “hands” on the debate stage. When it came to our media coverage, it turned out that even sexist attention was better than no attention at all.

So what does this mean for Haley as she figures out how to go up against Trump? It depends on what she wants out of this campaign. She can play to win, try for the vice presidency, or build for next time.

Haley surely knows she is a long shot to win the nomination. The Republican primary is beginning to look like the 2008 Democratic contest: All of the focus was on Hillary Clinton, the inevitable, and Barack Obama, the alternative. Nobody cared about John Edwards or Joe Biden. Haley is going to have a near-impossible time being taken seriously as long as Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis remain the focus of the Republican field.

But winning isn’t the only reason people run for president; sometimes they’re just hoping for a spot on the ticket. Fiorina ran a major U.S. company (Hewlett-Packard) and was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in California. I don’t think she did a single major interview in the 2016 campaign where she escaped having to answer the question “Are you running for vice president?” It was infuriating. I don’t remember any of the men getting asked this question. (Then, when the primary got down to the final three candidates, Ted Cruz asked her to be his running mate. So we sure proved everyone wrong.) Still, there’s no denying that running for president elevated Fiorina’s profile. She almost certainly would have been the VP pick or a high-ranking Cabinet secretary for 16 of the 17 GOP candidates. Too bad that 17th guy won.

As with Fiorina, the problem for Haley is that Trump is very unlikely to pick her to be his running mate. Since leaving his administration, Haley has awkwardly danced between praising and criticizing Trump. Then, after saying she would not run against him, she decided she would. She has already failed Trump’s first (and arguably only) test for women: loyalty to him in all things. Even if she helps him take down DeSantis, it won’t be enough. That’s a reason for her to root for DeSantis and even help him defeat Trump, in the hopes of becoming DeSantis’s VP pick.

[Read: Why Fiorina won]

A more obvious reason to run for president is simply to stay relevant for the next campaign. There is a long history of repeat candidates winning their party’s nomination on a second try. For Haley’s own political ambitions, a Trump nomination might be the best outcome: Whether he won or lost the general election, the GOP field would be open again in four years.

If Haley uses this campaign as her practice round, she can focus on selling her strengths as a candidate, building a national fundraising base, and increasing her name recognition. To do that, she needs to be part of the conversation. She needs to land punches against both Trump and DeSantis to get them to engage with her, and then weather the inevitable attacks. And she has to do it without alienating Trump’s or DeSantis’s voters.

So far, Haley is signaling that she’s willing to challenge her rivals. “I don’t put up with bullies,” she said in her campaign video. “And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.” Now she just has to hope that Trump takes the bait. He usually does.

The North American skies, it turns out, contain lots of unidentified objects. That is the unremarkable conclusion from a remarkable weekend in which fighter jets downed a trio of separate flying things—over Alaska, northern Canada, and Lake Huron. This weekend’s sky wars followed the identification and eventual downing of a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this month, only after it had traversed the continental United States and was safely over U.S. waters.

This is a strange series of events. A single deployment of Air Force units to obliterate something in the sky is unusual; to have three more in close succession seems quite unprecedented. Is this activity connected to a sophisticated new Chinese plot? Russian opportunism? Some other aggression testing our systems? Aliens? Pentagon officials have downplayed that last possibility while offering little additional detail about what these objects are. Before Americans react with rage or fear over the apparent uptick in intrusions into our skies, we should consider the simplest explanation: a recalibration of the U.S. military’s policies on aerial intrusions. We are seeing the legacy of the Chinese-balloon incident, which put two new factors in play.

First, the U.S. is finding more things in the sky because it is looking for more things. The scope and quality of the surveillance of American skies have increased since the first incident earlier this month and the subsequent public revelation of previous Chinese incursions. Air-defense authorities have widened the camera aperture, so to speak, and doing so will give them more, not fewer, things to look at. This does not mean the objects are threatening or even new. Think of an MRI, which may find cell clumps that are cancerous—but will also find clumps that are innocuous and would be nothing but for the looking.

[Read: Red zeppelin]

Second, just as our surveillance has increased, America’s standard for shooting stuff out of the sky is now lower. The Chinese balloon has made U.S. officials more willing to act, even knowing that many such cases could be false positives. American airspace is full of objects—balloons, surveillance equipment, corporate gizmos, various other innocuously errant devices—and American air defense seems to have been relatively tolerant of those in the past. After all, there is a lot of sky, and scrambling F-22s is expensive. The risk calculation now—is the device manned? Does it threaten commercial aviation? Would shooting it harm people below?—is being balanced well before any verification of what the thing is.

Recent events have increased the likelihood of a shootdown. Lest people around the world assume that the downed objects reflect hostile intentions, the White House should quickly disclose the nature of the objects now in U.S. possession, even if they are nothing significant. Especially if they are nothing significant. The U.S. cannot shoot first and then avoid asking or answering questions.

Is something nefarious going on? Maybe, maybe not. The U.S. may be under a new threat or finally seeing more evidence of an old threat, but perhaps none of this is new or terribly threatening. Jumping to only one conclusion, without considering others, is the quickest way to make a major national-security error.

Ukraine's Air Force said Russia fired Kalibr cruise missiles, dozens of guided missiles, and Iranian-made drones.

The Chinese spy balloon that was spotted and shot down on Saturday over the coast of South Carolina was far from the first threatening object to trouble American skies. Balloons have dogged U.S. aerial defenses, confounded fighter pilots, and driven UFO sightings for more than 75 years.

Balloons were used for spying and bombing throughout World War I, and German zeppelins regularly crossed the English Channel to drop hand grenades or small bombs on London in early, primitive air raids. One American pilot, Frank Luke, was known as the “Arizona Balloon Buster” for a balloon-shooting spree that downed 14 German balloons across the skies of Europe in just a few weeks in 1918.

But American civilians didn’t begin to be concerned about attacks from the sky until World War II, when major cities instituted blackouts and installed anti-aircraft batteries. Japan lofted about 9,000 balloon bombs toward the West Coast in 1944 and 1945—using the same high-altitude wind currents that aided the Chinese spy balloon. The “Fu-Go” devices carried about 50 pounds of explosives, designed to drop over North America at the end of the flight. The hope was that they would spread fear, ignite forest fires, and bring the war to America’s homeland.

These first intercontinental weapons proved to be more nuisances than aerial terrors; most Americans never even realized the attack was under way, because a press blackout, meant to prevent the Japanese from understanding the effectiveness or direction of their weapons, kept news of the devices silent. Balloons were found across western Canada and many U.S. states, some as far east as Michigan. Although some exploded and startled Westerners, they failed to start any fires. Only one killed people: In May 1945, a woman and a group of children discovered a fallen balloon during a picnic in Oregon and accidentally set it off, which killed her and five others. The devices continued to be found for decades afterward; in 2014, two foresters in British Columbia found a half-buried bomb, the balloon itself long rotted away.

At the end of World War II, the country had escaped unscathed from any aerial assault; the only building damaged in Washington, D.C., was the Lincoln Memorial, which took the brunt of a four-shot burst from an anti-aircraft gun accidentally fired from atop the Interior Department. It was only after the war that the skies became a real threat.

The arrival of the nuclear bomb meant that an entire city could be vaporized by a lone attacker arriving out of the blue sky. As E. B. White wrote in a postwar essay about New York, “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy … All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation.”

Coinciding with the dawn of the atomic age was the UFO craze. Reports of a mysterious flight of objects over the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest in 1947 touched off a summer of excited, panicked sightings. UFOs were reported in nearly every state—so many that the Air Force and the newly forming Pentagon began to worry that the Soviet Union had devised some devious new craft.

Six months into the national obsession with UFOs, Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a World War II pilot assigned to the Kentucky Air National Guard, was returning in an F-51 Mustang from a training mission with three other pilots when air-traffic controllers at Godman Army Airfield, in Fort Knox, asked them to investigate a UFO spotted over the state. The white object had been reported by the state police and appeared to be slowly moving over Kentucky at a high altitude. Witnesses estimated that it was 250 to 300 feet in diameter.

About an hour after it came into view, Mantell and two other pilots set off in pursuit. Although his wingman never saw the object, Mantell—a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross—radioed that he had the UFO in sight “ahead and above; I’m still climbing.” He had no oxygen equipment aboard and wasn’t meant to fly at such high altitudes, yet Mantell raced ahead of the other fighters into the ever-thinner air, ultimately reaching above 20,000 feet.

His fellow pilots lost sight of him, and an hour later, word came from the state police that his plane had broken apart and crashed into the lawn of a farm near the Tennessee border.

No one knew exactly what he had been chasing. When air-traffic controllers asked him to report on it, he replied with a final message, but by the time investigators arrived at the airbase, no one could remember exactly what he had said. Some recollected him saying, “It appears metallic, of tremendous size,” but others held that his final report was more ambiguous: “It’s above me and I’m gaining on it.”

The death of a fighter pilot chasing a UFO made national headlines. Rumors long circulated (and still do) that Mantell was actually shot down by the UFO. But investigators concluded that he’d flown too high, run out of oxygen, and lost consciousness, and that his plane had broken apart in the high speeds of its fall. The Air Force later theorized that there had been no UFO—that Mantell had been chasing the glowing dot of the planet Venus. But it was hard to imagine how an experienced pilot in the middle of the day could have been fatally confused by a planet.

In 1952, the Air Force’s UFO-investigation program, Project Blue Book, figured out that he’d most likely been chasing a Navy weather balloon. The giant craft, known as Skyhook balloons, were manufactured and launched by General Mills (yes, the cereal company) and used for atmospheric studies. The balloons soared as high as 100,000 feet, and because they were secret at the time, the Air Force observers on the ground wouldn’t have known of their existence. To Mantell, the balloon was literally a UFO: an unidentified flying object.

In the postwar era, balloons represented cutting-edge military technology. The U.S. had multiple secret balloon projects under way—including one, Project Mogul, that is both the official (and the likeliest) explanation for the mysterious wreckage found on a New Mexico ranch near Roswell in 1947. The balloons, once perfected, lofted their way over the Soviet Union—taking photographs, listening, and examining the air for signs of possible nuclear tests—much to the embarrassment and frustration of Soviet officials, who found them out of reach of missiles and fighters.

At home in the U.S., as investigators in the 1940s and 1950s untangled the thousands of UFO sightings of that era, the secret balloons ranked alongside confusion with astronomical phenomena as the most common UFO explanations. Often, after all, the balloons appeared in the sky to people on the ground just as the Chinese balloon did last week: giant, white, slow-moving craft at altitudes where aircraft don’t normally fly.

The threat from the sky has never completely abated. Early in the Cold War, President Harry Truman launched Operation Skywatch and the Ground Observer Corps, a massive civil-defense effort to staff 24-hour watch stations on the lookout for Soviet bombers. President Dwight Eisenhower’s era saw Operation Moonwatch, a similar effort to track satellites post-Sputnik. In later years, the U.S. and Canada formed the North American Aerospace Defense Command with its massive bunker inside Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, meant to watch the skies for incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles and, more recently, to track potential space weapons.

Today’s sophisticated surveillance systems seem to have forgotten to protect against a simple balloon. The head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command says that American air defenses and intelligence systems have failed to spot the forays of other Chinese balloons. And thus, on Saturday, the U.S. military deployed one of the most advanced weapon systems in the world, the F-22, to shoot down the modern version of the first aerial weapon the country ever faced.

Notably, the pilot who flew that plane on Saturday is known as FRANK01—a call sign that honors Frank Luke, the balloon-busting ace of 1918.

Photographs by Brian Finke

“WE WERE A BIT CRAZY”

Kairos Power’s new test facility is on a parched site a few miles south of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, airport. Around it, desert stretches toward hazy mountains on the horizon. The building looks like a factory or a warehouse; nothing about it betrays the moonshot exercise happening within. There, digital readouts count down the minutes, T-minus style, until power begins flowing to a test unit simulating the blistering heat of a new kind of nuclear reactor. In this test run, electricity, not uranium, will furnish the energy; graphite-encased fuel pebbles, each about the size of a golf ball, will be dummies containing no radioactive material. But everything else will be true to life, including the molten fluoride salt that will flow through the device to cool it. If all goes according to plan, the system—never tried before—will control and regulate a simulated chain reaction. When I glance at a countdown clock behind the receptionist during a visit last May, it says 31 days, 8 hours, 9 minutes, and 22 seconds until the experiment begins.

The test unit looks surprisingly unimpressive: a shiny cylindrical drum only about 16 feet tall, resembling an oversize water heater. The scale is unlike that of an existing commercial nuclear plant. Forget about those airport-scale compounds with their fortresslike containment enclosures and 40-story cooling towers belching steam. This reactor will sit in an ordinary building the size of, say, a suburban self-storage facility. It will be made in factories for easy shipping and rapid assembly. Customers will be able to buy just one, to power a chemical or steel plant, or a few, linked like batteries, to power a city. Most important, even if a local disaster cuts the power to the cooling system and safety systems fail, this reactor will not melt down, spew radioactive material, or become too hot and dangerous to approach. It will remain stable until normal conditions are restored.

Small and safe is the vision, at least. Dozens of companies and labs in the U.S. and abroad are pursuing it. Kairos is well along, with a permit to build a full-fledged nuclear test reactor already moving toward federal approval, hopefully by the end of 2023. That test will depend on this one in Albuquerque, because molten-salt reactor cooling has not been tried in the United States since the 1960s, when a five-year experiment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, proved the idea viable. In a few days, the test unit’s top will be installed, crowning the device with bristling pipes and sensors. Nearby, welders ready those pipes and valves. Engineers stand on top of scaffolding slotting graphite reflectors into place.

As I tour the facility, however, I soon realize that the crucial technology is not 16 feet tall but about 5 foot 6, balding, with jeans and thick, black-framed glasses. John Muratore runs this test operation and, as you would expect, is an experienced engineer; as you might not expect, he is a space engineer, not a nuclear one. As a boy in the ’60s, he was the archetypal kid who built model planes and joined the rocketry club and never stopped daydreaming about human flight. He spent 24 years working for NASA, where he was a flight controller for the space-shuttle program under the legendary flight director Gene Kranz, of Apollo 13 movie fame. Then he spent a decade working for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s world-beating private spaceflight company. Nuclear power wasn’t on his radar until recently, when Kairos’s executives called him for advice and wound up recruiting him. “A lot of it was the same,” he told me. “A launchpad and a nuclear reactor have a lot in common”—extreme temperatures, and many tons of concrete, and lots of pipes and valves and sensors and controls that must work together with extreme precision.

There’s another, more significant similarity: “The industry is hobbled by costs and schedule overruns, as was the launch industry prior to SpaceX.” Managing complex projects—and bringing new vigor to old ideas—is something Muratore’s 40 years in the space industry have taught him a lot about.

Nuclear power is in a strange position today. Those who worry about climate change have come to see that it is essential. The warming clock is ticking—another sort of countdown—and replacing fossil fuels is much easier with nuclear power in the equation. And yet the industry, in many respects, looks unready to step into a major role. It has consistently flopped as a commercial proposition. Decade after decade, it has broken its promises to deliver new plants on budget and on time, and, despite an enviable safety record, it has failed to put to rest the public’s fear of catastrophic accidents. Many of the industry’s best minds know they need a new approach, and soon. For inspiration, some have turned toward SpaceX, Tesla, and Apple.

Michael Thomas, a Kairos machinist, loads a part into a milling machine for modifications. (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

“Yeah, we were a bit crazy to try to do this,” Per Peterson, Kairos’s co-founder and chief nuclear officer, told me when I asked about starting a company from scratch and setting out to make the nuclear industry agile and competitive. “But I don’t remember ever lacking the confidence that it was feasible for us to do what we wanted to do.” The fate of the industry, and in some measure the planet, depends on whether he and like-minded entrepreneurs can finally keep their promises.

“WHY CAN’T YOU BUILD US A NUCLEAR PLANT?”

When I started reporting this article, I imagined it might be a diatribe against the environmental movement’s resistance to nuclear power. For a generation or more, the United States has been fighting climate change—and all the other ills that result from fossil fuels—with one hand tied behind its back. Bruce Babbitt, a former secretary of the interior and governor of Arizona, was on a presidential commission to evaluate nuclear power after the Three Mile Island plant’s partial meltdown in 1979, the U.S. industry’s worst accident. Though no one died or was even injured—and the accident led to new protocols and training under which the plant’s second, intact reactor operated uneventfully until 2019—the accident hardened the public and environmentalists against nuclear energy. After that, as Babbitt told me, “opposition in the environmental community was near unanimous. The position was ‘No new nuclear plants, and we should phase out the existing nuclear base.’ ” Which was the road the U.S. took. Today legacy nuclear power supplies about 20 percent of American electricity, but the country has fired up only one new power reactor since 1996.

From an environmental point of view, this seems like a perverse strategy, because nuclear power, as most people know, is carbon-free—and is also, as fewer people realize, fantastically safe. Only the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, has caused mass fatalities from radioactivity, and the plant there was subpar and mismanaged, by Western standards. Excluding Chernobyl, the total number of deaths attributed to a radiation accident at a commercial nuclear-power plant is zero or one, depending on your interpretation of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima accident. The Fukushima evacuation certainly caused deaths; Japanese authorities have estimated that more than 2,000 people may have died from disruptions in services such as nursing care and from stress-related factors such as alcoholism and depression. (Some experts now believe that the evacuation was far too large.) Even so, Japan’s decision to shut down its nuclear plants has been estimated to cause multiples of that death toll, on account of the increased fossil-fuel pollution that followed.

The real challenge with giant nuclear plants like Fukushima and Three Mile Island is not making them safe but doing so at a reasonable price, which is the problem that companies like Kairos are trying to solve. But even people who feel scared of nuclear power do not dispute that fossil fuels are orders of magnitude more dangerous. One study, published in 2021, estimated that air pollution from fossil fuels killed about 1 million people in 2017 alone. In fact, nuclear power’s safety record to date is easily on par with the wind and solar industries, because wind turbines and rooftop panels create minor risks such as falls and fire. As for nuclear waste, it has turned out to be a surprisingly manageable problem, partly because there isn’t much of it; all of the spent fuel the U.S. nuclear industry has ever created could be buried under a single football field to a depth of less than 10 yards, according to the Department of Energy. Unlike coal waste, which is of course spewed into the air we breathe, radioactive waste is stored in carefully monitored casks.

And so environmentalists, I thought, were betraying the environment by stigmatizing nuclear power. But I had to revise my view. Even without green opposition, nuclear power as we knew it would have fizzled—today’s environmentalists are not the main obstacle to its wide adoption.

To be sure, environmentalists do not love nuclear power. They much prefer solar and wind. But as Babbitt told me, “They’re all coming around. The attitudes in the environmental community are perceptibly changing.” Although only a handful of the mainline environmental organizations are openly “nuclear inclusive” (for example, the Nature Conservancy), many quietly accept that nuclear power can be part of the climate solution, and perhaps a necessary part.

Because solar and wind power are inherently intermittent, they require other energy sources to even out peaks and dips. Natural gas and coal can do that, but of course the goal is to retire them. Batteries can help but are much too expensive to rely on at present, and mining, manufacturing, and disposing of them entail their own environmental harms. Also, nuclear power is the only efficient way to provide zero-carbon heat for high-temperature industrial processes such as steelmaking, which account for about a fifth of energy consumption.

Perhaps most important, adding solar and wind capacity becomes more expensive and controversial as the most accessible land is used up. Nuclear energy’s footprint is extremely small. Solar-energy production uses dozens of times as much land per unit of energy produced; wind uses much more land than that. According to congressional testimony by Armond Cohen of the Clean Air Task Force, meeting all of the eastern United States’ energy needs might require 100,000 square miles of solar panels (an area greater than New England) or more than 800,000 square miles of onshore windmills (Alaska plus California), versus only a bit over 500 square miles of nuclear plants (the city of Phoenix, Arizona). Given the amount of real estate that solar and wind farms usurp, efforts to place them are running into entirely predictable local resistance, which will only increase as the easiest and cheapest sites are picked off.

Finally, as low- and middle-income countries develop over the next several decades, they will almost double the world’s demand for electricity. Total global energy consumption will rise by 30 percent by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Meeting this challenge while reducing carbon emissions will be much harder, if not impossible, without a nuclear assist.

Left: Javier Talamantes, a Kairos technologist, installs one of the thousands of sensors that feed data
to the test unit. Right: A sensor monitors environmental oxygen levels to ensure the safety of personnel working on the unit. (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

Recognizing as much, three consecutive administrations—Barack Obama’s, Donald Trump’s, and now Joe Biden’s—have included next-generation nuclear power in their policy agenda. Both parties in Congress support federal R&D funding, which has run into the billions in the past few years. Two-thirds of the states have told the Associated Press they want to include nuclear power in their green-energy plans. “Today the topic of new nuclear is front of mind for all our member utilities,” says Doug True, a senior vice president and the chief nuclear officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. “We have states saying, ‘Why can’t you build us a nuclear plant?’ ”

Thanks to those developments, the table is set for nuclear power in a way that has not been true for two generations. So what is the main problem for the nuclear-power industry? In sum: the nuclear-power industry.

“WE GOT BOGGED DOWN”

The U.S. has two big commercial reactors under construction, both at the same site in Georgia. The licensing process for them began in 2008; construction began in 2012, with a projected price of $14 billion and start-up planned for 2017 at the latest. As of February 2022, the projected cost had mushroomed to $30 billion, and the reactors still aren’t open. (Hopefully in 2023, the sponsoring utility says.)

No one who knows the industry is surprised. In the United States, construction delays on the Georgia reactors and others drove Westinghouse, the company building them, into bankruptcy. France started building a new reactor at its Flamanville plant in 2007, planning to open it in five years; as of this writing, it is still not ready. Britain approved a major plant in 2008 and probably won’t turn it on until 2027, and the project is 50 percent over budget. Delays and cost overruns are so routine that they are simply assumed. “Nuclear as it exists today,” Mike Laufer, a co-founder and the CEO of Kairos Power, told me, “is clean, it’s reliable, it’s safe. But it’s not affordable”—at least when it comes to building new plants—“and this is what’s holding nuclear back from a much bigger role in fighting climate change.”

Industry veterans recall the 1950s and ’60s as a time of new ideas and experimentation in nuclear power. For scientists and engineers, the atom had the same kind of romantic, adventurous appeal as the space program. In 1968, a company called General Atomics got a license to build a gas-cooled reactor in Colorado, a new design and potentially the start of a new era. Instead, it proved to be the industry’s last stab at fundamental innovation. Thanks to incremental upgrades, today’s legacy nuclear plants cost almost 40 percent less to run than they did in 2012, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, but if you had fallen asleep in the ’70s and awakened today, you would recognize the basic nuclear-power model as the same, both technologically and as a business proposition.

In particular, you would see the same gigantic plants and staggering building costs. In the 1970s, the industry stopped pursuing alternatives to using water to cool the hot nuclear core and transfer heat to steam turbines generating electricity. Water worked fine, but it had to be held under extreme pressure to stay fluid at fission temperatures, and if it boiled off, meltdowns were an inherent risk. Accidents could be reliably prevented, but only by building in elaborate safety measures, all of which necessitated costly engineering and heavy regulatory oversight. One executive likens constructing this style of plant to building a pyramid point-down: You could do it, but only with some heroic engineering. Reactors needed electric-powered pumps, and redundant cooling systems in case those failed, and massive containment structures in case those failed. The need for all of that redundancy and mass raised costs, inducing utility companies to seek economies of scale by making big reactors. Designing giant plants, each bespoke for a specific site, took years; licensing and building them took years more. “We got bogged down,” Kairos’s Peterson explained. “As we made plants bigger, we also made them unconstructable.” The creativity of the ’60s gave way to an industry that became, as John Muratore, the Kairos engineer, told me, “very formal, very bureaucratic, very slow, driven by safety concerns.” Meanwhile, as plants became ever more expensive, the relative cost of fossil fuels was declining and renewables were coming online—and, after the accident at Three Mile Island, public hostility became a problem, too.

Left to right: The Kairos Power co-founders Mike Laufer, Per Peterson, and Edward Blandford outside the facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

And so, in a generation, nuclear power went from the fuel of the future to not worth the bother. Supply chains withered; talented engineers and executives sought greener pastures. The United States, once the industry’s world leader, became an also-ran. Today, as Peterson said, we find ourselves “mired in this world where all you can get are light-water reactors, and they’re challenging and expensive to build, and we don’t have good alternatives. Breaking out of that set of problems is one of the critical things we need to do today.” That requires technological breakthroughs; more important, however, it requires attitudinal ones.

“BUILD A LITTLE, TEST A LITTLE, FIX A LITTLE”

Born in Brooklyn in 1956, John Muratore remembers visiting the 1964–65 World’s Fair, where an exhibit touted the energy of the atom in all its futuristic glory. He got an irradiated dime there and carried it around for years. (He now has a replacement that he bought on eBay.) Still, flight was his obsession, and so he took his Yale engineering degree to the Air Force’s aerospace program and then, perhaps inevitably, to NASA. After achieving his dream of serving as flight director—he oversaw five space-shuttle missions, including the first repair of the Hubble Space Telescope—he shifted to developing mission-control software. “We used a rapid iterative-build technology,” he told me, meaning that his team figured out how to develop new features in months instead of the previously customary years. The operative philosophy was build a little, test a little, fix a little.

That led him and some of his colleagues to wonder: Could they build a spacecraft the same way? In place of projects that were perfected on paper before ever being tried in space, could Silicon Valley–style trial and error work at NASA? He joined a team that used exactly those methods to build the X‑38, an emergency-reentry vehicle for astronauts on the International Space Station. Again, the team built, tested, fixed, and then repeated the cycle, learning by iterating. After a series of flights in which it was dropped from planes at varying altitudes, the X-38 was on the verge of its decisive space trial when the George W. Bush administration canceled it in a fit of parsimony. That disappointment eventually led Muratore out of NASA and, after an interlude as a professor, to SpaceX.

SpaceX was one of several private-sector competitors in a NASA program to relaunch, as it were, crewed spaceflight. The company set ambitious schedules and took big risks, a method that had its downsides: Prototypes blew up. But SpaceX proved its point. Today it is worth about $125 billion and has transformed spaceflight from a government program to a viable commercial business.

Per Peterson was among those who noticed how quickly and thoroughly SpaceX had revolutionized a staid (and in some ways troubled) industry. By his own account, Peterson had grown up “a bit of a flaming environmentalist and pretty liberal”; he put himself through college working in a bike shop before getting his doctorate, becoming an expert on heat transfer, and, as a professor at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, researching how to make nuclear-power plants safer. He came to understand how molten salt could replace water to cool a reactor core. Unlike water, molten salt stays liquid at high temperatures, so it doesn’t require ultrahigh pressurization and won’t boil away. That lets engineers dispense with heavy containment structures, allowing for smaller, cheaper, safer reactors.

Left: In-house machinery produces custom components, allowing Kairos Power to create and test prototypes quickly. Right: Muratore supervises operations in the on-site control room. (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

Salt cooling is a technology that dates back to the 1960s but has not yet been successfully commercialized. Peterson, Mike Laufer, and a third colleague named Edward Blandford thought they could make that breakthrough by applying SpaceX’s methods. They founded Kairos in Oakland, California, in 2017, and today they have 300 employees, including Muratore, whom they nabbed in 2020. At the Kairos test center in Albuquerque, Muratore showed me an on-site machine shop—run by another SpaceX veteran—where engineers can fabricate parts in a matter of hours, and then walk them over to the test unit to see how they perform, and then refine and rework them. The idea is to make any errors fast and early, before they cause delays and overruns, and to learn during the design process how to simplify and speed up real-world manufacturing. Build a little, test a little, fix a little.

“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GO SMALLER?”

Peterson and his colleagues were not the only people to be frustrated by the industry’s failures, nor were they the only ones to launch ambitious start-ups. José Reyes, for instance, the Manhattan-born child of a Honduran father and a Dominican mother, was attracted to nuclear power in the go-go years of the 1970s, before Three Mile Island and ballooning costs kneecapped the industry. After training as a nuclear engineer, he worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and then, at Oregon State University, on reactor design and testing. “I wanted to build something that was remarkably safe,” he told me. And he was intrigued by the countercultural idea of inverting traditional assumptions about economies of scale. “What happens when you go smaller?” he started to wonder. “That was kind of a surprise. You can start making these in factories.” In 2007, he co-founded NuScale Power to bring his concept to market. He says the company plans to deliver its first commercial reactor in 2027.

In my interviews with nuclear entrepreneurs like Peterson and Reyes, a pattern developed. The newcomers have engineering backgrounds but few if any ties to traditional nuclear utilities. They think that climate change is a dire problem, that nuclear power can ameliorate it, and that time is short. They don’t believe that conventional thinking offers sufficient answers, and so they take inspiration from elsewhere. Clay Sell, the CEO of an advanced-nuclear company called X-energy, cited both SpaceX and Apple, likening the company’s design process to the creation of the iPhone. Francesco Venneri, the Italian-born founder of a company he named (lest anyone miss the point) Ultra Safe Nuclear, said, “The model we’re trying to imitate is Tesla.”

The engineering choices that these companies and entrepreneurs are making vary. For instance, NuScale’s designs use water as the coolant, but rely on convection and gravity, not pumps, so they stay cool if electricity fails; Ultra Safe’s and X-energy’s use helium gas. TerraPower, another competitor, recently launched its own test of salt cooling, but using a different kind of salt from Kairos. What these diverse efforts share philosophically, though, is much more important than their technological differences: They seek to invert the industry’s lethargic, scale-driven business model. They think of themselves as building airplanes instead of airports—that is, as shifting the industry paradigm to mass production. (NuScale thinks it could sell three modular reactors a month; Ultra Safe hopes to start with 10 a year.) They all believe they can make nuclear fission inherently safe—and, crucially, win the public’s confidence.

Today Kairos, NuScale, Ultra Safe, and X-energy all say they can deploy advanced commercial reactors before the decade is out. The space is now rife with contenders; Third Way has identified nearly 150 companies and national labs around the world that are working on small, advanced nuclear reactors. The needed technologies are here. The goal is defined. So we’re back to the same old question: Can the industry deliver?

Some skepticism is warranted. Even if the innovators can eventually crack the code of affordable mass production, their Version 1.0 products won’t be cheap; to get launched, they will need risk-friendly investors and customers, as well as backing from Congress, the Energy Department, and government labs, not unlike the NASA incentives that propelled SpaceX. Perhaps the single biggest challenge, and one SpaceX did not face, is to modernize the slow-moving federal regulatory apparatus, which was built in our parents and grandparents’ era, when schedules were relaxed and cost overruns were fobbed off on utility customers.

Kairos Power, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

Still, I came away from my conversations about the industry convinced that today presents the best opportunity in two generations for reinvention to take hold. The perception that the fight against runaway global warming could be lost within the next 20 years is a powerful motivator. So, too, is the realization that continued global reliance on oil and gas is a boon to democracy’s adversaries, most notably Russia. And if the United States fails to develop a competitive nuclear industry, our rivals will be happy to fill the gap. Russia is the predominant supplier of nuclear-power reactors in the global market, and China, which plans to build more domestic reactors in the next 15 years than the rest of the world has built in the past 35, hopes to elbow Russia aside. Those countries are also in the race to perfect the advanced, unconventional technologies that Kairos and its competitors are pursuing; China, for example, hopes to deploy a salt-cooled commercial reactor around 2030. Of course, we can assume that China and Russia will exploit any geostrategic leverage they can gain by dominating the global nuclear business. For reasons of grand strategy—as well as for safety and reliability—it would be better if U.S. companies and technologies were in the lead. All of this is on the minds of bureaucrats and politicians today.

“IT’S ALL VERY SIMILAR”

In September, I joined a Zoom call to check on the progress of Kairos Power’s simulation experiment in Albuquerque. I saw the control room I had toured several months earlier: two rows of computer monitors facing a bank of screens that show video feeds and data streams. Besides John Muratore, only two operators—a test director and a test engineer—were in the room. Dozens of other engineers and executives monitored the proceedings from afar. The test didn’t present much of a spectacle. Supply-chain problems with heaters had delayed the launch by several weeks, but in August electricity had begun flowing into the shiny drum that mimicked an advanced reactor. Inside the simulator, hundreds of sensors dispatched data to the control room as the core’s temperature rose to the levels of a nuclear reaction.

That day, it measured almost 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet according to Muratore, the test unit was cool to the touch. At that high temperature, he told me, the system had been stable for several days, though hot spots needed attention. Early in 2023, after the hardware passed muster, salt would be introduced for weeks of evaluating and tweaking. With the results in hand, the company would begin construction of its full-fledged test reactor, with live nuclear fuel, in Oak Ridge—the same place the previous U.S. experiment with a salt-cooled reactor had been conducted, back in the 1960s. What’s old is new again.

Or rather, to be more precise, what is newest and potentially most significant about Kairos’s test is not a technological invention. Rather, it is innovation more broadly conceived. First and foremost, Kairos is devising not a nuclear technology but a business technology: a method of organizing a very complex project to be faster, simpler, more efficient, and cheaper. This kind of process innovation may not look like much, but it’s what nuclear power needs if it is to fulfill its extraordinary promise.

As my virtual tour wound down, I asked to meet the test director. Up from behind a monitor popped Davis Libbey. When I asked about his background, he said he was a recent recruit from—I should have seen this coming—SpaceX. John Muratore had snapped him up just a few months earlier. Apart from having to deal with very hot rather than very cold temperatures, he said, switching from spaceflight to nuclear power had been seamless. “From a control-room standpoint, this is very much what you’d see in South Texas or Hawthorne,” he said, referring to a SpaceX launch site and to its headquarters in California. “It’s all very similar.”

For the sake of the nuclear industry and the planet, we need to hope so.

WHAT ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE?

In 1987, Congress authorized a national nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada; for good measure, it banned permanently storing nuclear waste anywhere else. Unfortunately, that repository never opened and, thanks to obstacles both political and practical, apparently never will. Meanwhile, nuclear waste sits safely but only (in theory) temporarily at reactor sites around the country. To win public acceptance, Elizabeth Muller told me recently, the nuclear industry needs to resolve the waste problem, not just downplay it.

Muller is in her early 40s, the daughter of a physics professor. Alarmed by climate change, in 2010 she and her father started a climate-science nonprofit, Berkeley Earth, which argued that replacing coal with shale gas (a controversial proposition among some environmentalists, because it involves the water-injection process known as fracking) had to be part of the solution in the near term—and that the longer-term transition from hydrocarbons would require more nuclear power.

From their focus on natural gas, the Mullers knew that, by using computer-assisted directional drilling, an oil or gas rig can drill for miles in any direction, not just straight down but nosing horizontally along rich seams deep underground. (This transformative technology enabled the fracking revolution.) At a forum in 2015, Muller and her father, Richard Muller, heard a presentation about using boreholes to deposit nuclear waste in deep geological strata that have been stable for epochs. Her father, Muller said, “immediately thought of drilling horizontally into shale formations that have held volatile materials for millions of years.” Because geological strata are stacked horizontally, like pancakes, a vertical hole passes rapidly through them, exposing little area for potential storage. Instead, by drilling sideways to follow a suitable formation, “you get a lot more space at a given depth.” That creates more storage options at any given location, without having to truck waste to some distant (and currently nonexistent) repository.

Months after that forum, the Mullers founded a company, Deep Isolation. In 2018, they received seed funding, and the following year they showed that a drill rig on the surface could deposit specially designed waste canisters in horizontal boreholes, then later retrieve them, without any humans needing to work underground. The demonstration opened the possibility that waste can be safely stored, monitored, and if need be recovered near the sites that produce it, where communities are already accustomed to having nuclear neighbors. The company now employs about 50 people, Muller told me, and has won customer contracts in multiple countries, including the United States.

Can Deep Isolation succeed? Maybe, maybe not, but its greater significance is as an example of how the Big Nuclear mindset is cracking. Even a few years ago, the idea of an unconventional commercial start-up taking on the most intractable problem the industry faces—a problem that has defeated billions of dollars and ambitious government planning—would have seemed far-fetched, if not inconceivable.