Does the prospect of nuclear disaster still frighten anyone these days?

[JuliaL]

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It is hard to judge the minds of the decision makers of 60 years ago. We cannot un-learn what is now common wisdom regarding nuclear winter and the long term effects of widespread high level fallout. The 1950s was a time when above ground testing was considered reasonable, high level nuclear waste disposal was a problem we would solve when necessary.

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Oh, they knew enough to willingly expose their own soldiers to the nuclear fallout. To test what it did to their organisms. Both super powers did that in the 50ies.

And then there were turds like Edward Teller, who never grew tired of demanding a first strike against the Russians, even if it meant widespread destruction.

You and I agree that Edward Teller was a shit. He and Curtis LeMay along with Stalin & Mao are some of my least favorite people of history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

During the war, he was known for planning and executing a massive bombing campaign against cities in Japan and a crippling minelaying campaign in Japan's internal waterways. After the war, he initiated the Berlin airlift, then reorganized the Strategic Air Command (SAC) into an effective instrument of nuclear war.

My interest in knowing Teller's (and others of his time) mind stems from wanting to understand why he (as do all of us) thought he was right in his actions. Was he toilet trained too harshly?

I would like to know on what basis will the future judge us. I like to think it will be for killing off all the other intelligent species on the planet in favor of American SUVs. Continuing to breed without limit and burn millions of MBtus of fossil fuels well after the effects of climate change became painfully obvious is in second place.

I am much more scared of biological warfare than nuclear ones

Also in agreement, though I'm not as scared of bio-warfare as I am of bio-terrorism. The warfare guys are at least trying to do only a controllable amount of damage. The techniques and technologies of gene manipulation and organism building are becoming more widespread. Our immunities, which have had millions of years to co-evolve with most of the micro-biome, are not up to the task of facing a directed attack.
The idea is common in fiction; in The Stand (Stephen King) the bug isn't specified but kills off pretty much everybody. I've read others where the bad news is a modified yersinia(plague) where the pneumonic form was made just a little more contagious and one where the 1919 Flu was re-created by the baddies (think a maker-bot on an atomic scale.)
Of course, in all the fiction I've read on this, the good guys win so we really shouldn't worry, right?