New York Times: A Time for Revisiting Real Fears. In which the writer visits a number of places in Ukraine, and reflects on a few artifacts from the nuclear past that never happened.

No one is building backyard fallout shelters or conducting Civil Defense drills as they did during the Cold War. More people seem worried about the next Fukushima than the very real possibility of a nuclear attack. In a talk last month, Gareth Evans, an Australian diplomat, politician and spokesman for disarmament, described this surreal disconnect: “That the world has managed to survive nearly 70 years without a nuclear holocaust — deliberately or accidentally initiated — is not a matter of the inherent stability of nuclear deterrence, or the wisdom of statesmen and the systems they oversee, but rather sheer, dumb luck.”