CD (Portland) — As new polling has revealed that most Americans now fear that the country may be heading to nuclear war over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, campaigners are calling on US lawmakers to take action to mitigate those fears, particularly by ensuring that the United States is doing all it can to deescalate tensions.

Antiwar groups including Peace Action and RootsAction organized picket lines at the offices of US senators and representatives in more than forty cities across twenty states last week, calling on lawmakers to push for a ceasefire in Ukraine, the revival of anti-nuclear treaties which the United States has exited in recent years, and other legislative actions to prevent nuclear catastrophe.

“Anyone paying attention should be worried about the rising dangers of nuclear war, but what we really need is action,” says Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction. “Picket lines at so many congressional offices across the country convey that more and more constituents are fed up with the timidity of elected officials who’ve refused to acknowledge the extent of the current grave dangers of nuclear war, much less speak out and take action to mitigate those dangers.”

The most recent polling released by Reuters/Ipsos on Monday showed that 58% of Americans now fear that the United States may be headed toward nuclear war.

The level of fear regarding a nuclear conflict is lower than it was in February and March 2022, shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, but some experts suggest that the polling shows a sustained fear about nuclear weapons which has been rare in the United States.

“The level of anxiety is something that I haven’t seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Peter Kuznick, history professor and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, told The Hill. “And that was short-lived. This has gone on for months now.”

Chris Jackson, senior vice-president of Ipsos, told the same outlet that he didn’t “recall any time in the last twenty years where we’ve seen this sort of level of concern about the potential for nuclear apocalypse.”

President Putin threatened the use of nuclear weapons last month, saying the United States set a “precedent” for using them when it dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. He added that he would use “all available means” to defend Russia.

New York Times reported last week that senior American officials say they have seen “no evidence” that Russia is moving its tactical nuclear weapons, but that they are also “far more concerned than they were at the start of the [Ukraine] conflict” that Moscow might use nuclear weapons now that Russian forces have been losing ground to the Ukrainian defenders.

Campaigners at “Defuse Nuclear War” picket lines last week called on members of the US Congress to allay their concerns by taking a number of key actions, including: adopting a “no first use” policy regarding nuclear weapons; pushing for the United States to reenter the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty; and passing legislation that calls upon the president “to embrace the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of US national security policy.”

Originally published at Common Dreams. Republished by cc by-sa 3.0. Minor edits for style and content.

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