Even though the days and times sometimes seem dark, especially during the long winter season, there was one spark of light amidst last week’s national news: A prospective secretary of defense’s belief that the United States needs to reduce its stockpiles of nuclear weapons barely made headlines.

Anyone who lived through the Cold War years — and that was a lot of Americans, because the Cold War stretched from the end of World War II until the Berlin Wall fell in 1991 — remembers what it was like to legitimately fear nuclear Armageddon. Even those who lived in rural Minnesota could not escape the shadow of Cold War fear; Soviet nuclear strikes at missile silos in the Dakotas would have surely have showered our state with fallout borne on prevailing northwesterly winds.

In those times, the slightest hint of a nuclear weapons reduction was major news. Some would greet such proposals with joy, others with skepticism and terror. Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense would, then, have caused a furor. His belief nuclear weapons stockpiles represent more of a liability than an asset in today’s global political climate has certainly attracted attention and will get more as his nomination is debated. But the level of interest in scrutiny is a tiny fraction of what it once would have been. This, it seems to us, is good news because it is a demonstration of how far the world has come from a time when nuclear destruction was a legitimate fear.

Terrorism and climate change are major issues. But neither seems to have the capacity to end the world as we know it overnight. That is progress.