War & Peace Quote by Larry Niven

There is something brutally casual in Niven's framing: the apocalypse as a long-term habit. The first sentence lands like a cold splash of realism - not a metaphorical "tensions were high", but a reminder that global thermonuclear war was structurally baked into policy, budgets, and daily life. Then he twists the knife with "we grew used to it", a phrase that exposes the most chilling human adaptation: when catastrophe becomes background noise, it stops feeling like a catastrophe at all.

Niven writes as a science-fiction author, which matters here. SF is often accused of escapism, but this is the genre's real trick: making the unimaginable legible. His intent isn't to relitigate deterrence theory; it's to spotlight normalization as a survival strategy that doubles as a moral failure. "Could have faced" suggests not just capability, but readiness - as if the species was practicing for extinction. The subtext is accusatory and almost anthropological: humans can accommodate anything, even the constant possibility of self-erasure, so long as the routines hold and the headlines eventually move on.

The context is a specific historical anesthesia: duck-and-cover drills, missile-crisis brinkmanship, pop culture with fallout shelters and nuclear jokes, the uneasy faith in "mutual assured destruction". Niven's point lands beyond the Cold War. If we could habituate ourselves to nuclear winter, what else are we currently learning to live with - and calling it normal?