Nuclear war and environmental collapse are central human challenges. The use of nuclear weapons poses an instantaneous threat to the ecology of the planet, but the creation of these weapons requires complex scientific and industrial processing of the inherently dangerous material uranium that generates a catalog of the most toxic wastes known to humanity. This dissertation identifies patterns of environmental outcomes that are shaped by the historical and social contexts of nuclear warmaking. The United States and the Soviet Union competed in a Cold War nuclear arms race that left a devastating legacy. A "treadmill of destruction" was generated by the inertial expansion and acceleration of an arms race that intensified the quantity and qualitative toxicity of nuclear waste streams. It was the social context of "exterminism" that crystallized in these societies, generating the treadmill of destruction mechanism; not all nuclear weapons production generates this mechanism. The appropriate configuration of antecedent conditions, critical junctures, structural persistence, and reactive sequences combine to produce a path-dependent outcome. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not signal an end to the treadmill of destruction; American and Russian nuclear warmaking has accelerated to unprecedented levels since the late 1990s. The treadmill of destruction mechanism is therefore critical to advancing our understanding of the developing tension between war and society. This tension is investigated in the context of nuclear warmaking as a set of historical processes that generated a unique and in some cases irremediable environmental legacy. The effort to clean up the legacy of these calamities may be one of the most complex and expensive scientific endeavors in human history, and the results so far have been discouraging. The emerging New Cold War urges nations to further modernize their nuclear arsenals, which may create new wastes and stymie meaningful remediation efforts by diverting resources and adding to the burden.