In this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, reviewing Lesley M.M. Blume's Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, William Langewiesche writes: "The subject of nuclear war is too important not to fascinate, and though we have avoided it for 75 years, the possibility now looms closer than before."
If the possibility of nuclear war indeed "now looms closer than before," you'd think this would be a matter for some front-page New York Times news articles and headlines, rather than a throwaway line midway through a book review. Personally, I don't see it. We've got a president who just spent his speech at the convention boasting about how he has "kept America out of new wars." Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz was recently damaged, and the Iranian regime has been crippled by tough economic sanctions re-imposed by Trump after our previous president was airlifting cash to Iran. U.S. relations with Russia, the other big nuclear power, are so friendly that some people worry that Putin will try to interfere to re-elect Trump. Missile defense technology to guard against an accidental launch is more advanced than ever. Even U.S.-North Korea relations appear to be warming.
Maybe this came in as "closer than ever before," and some editor took out the "ever." That helps but doesn't fully resolve the problem or authenticate the claim.