The morning of August 6, 1945, dawned clear and sunny as the Enola Gay wheeled over Hiroshima and dropped its payload on the city centre. The 15kt uranium bomb exploded 600 metres above the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, instantly flattening everything and everyone below. Only the skeletal structure of the hall remained, bearing witness to the moment when our beliefs about weapons and wars changed.
The concept of deterrence
In the intervening 78 years, we have witnessed the rise and fall of nuclear threats. The concept of nuclear deterrence attracted the sharpest minds in countries that both possessed nuclear weapons and abjured them. Especially as nuclear weapons became more powerful, it became clear that any nuclear use would be a global problem. This allowed a parallel development to occur: even as nuclear weapons states developed ever more destructive nukes, a taboo against their actual use began to develop. The political scientist Nina Tannenwald has defined the nuclear taboo as a coalescing norm against using nuclear weapons because these weapons are seen as so beyond the pale that there are almost no circumstances in which their use can be justified. Crucially, this taboo extends across the whole class of weapons, regardless of their yield, leading to a blanket prohibition of use that each passing year reinforces. However, this taboo has no legal basis; it rests on ideas of morality, proportionality and responsibility.
The taboo is grounded firmly in our treating nuclear weapons as different: nuclear weapons, in Bernard Brodie’s celebrated phrase, are the ‘absolute weapon’. This special treatment is grounded not so much in the power of the atomic bomb — we are able to dial up or down the destructive capability of modern nukes, and we have developed conventional munitions that rival some nuclear destructiveness; or even in the ability to flatten a city in moments. The special status of nuclear weapons rests on the continually reaffirmed knowledge gained from the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear weapons are indiscriminate and do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants; they contaminate the environment for decades; and the effects of the radiation are felt for generations. There are people in Japan still living with the consequences of August 1945.
Testing these notions
Events since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have tested our notions of deterrence and the taboo. Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued several veiled and not-so-veiled nuclear threats, ranging from reminding the world of Russia’s nuclear weapons status at the start of the war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022 to ordering Russia’s nuclear forces into a ‘special regime of combat duty’ a few days later (which left analysts scrambling to decode what that formulation might mean), to declaring in September 2022 that Russia was prepared to ‘make use of all weapon systems available to [them]. This is not a bluff.’ Dmitry Medvedev, currently deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia and others have echoed Mr. Putin’s threats.
Thirty-eight years after the leaders Ronald Reagan of the United States and Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union declared that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’ (and less than a year after Mr. Putin and President Joe Biden reaffirmed this pledge in June 2021), Russia was raising the spectre of nuclear Armageddon in Europe.
Future historians will decide how credible these threats were. Potentially, September and October 2022 might come to be regarded as a time when the nuclear taboo was tested almost to breaking point. Following battlefield reversals in late summer and Mr. Putin’s declaration that Russia was prepared to use ‘all weapons systems available’, speculation arose about whether Russia might use a tactical nuclear weapon and if so, where and how.
This was dangerous on multiple counts. To begin with, this conjecture risked creating expectations of its own that might have pushed the Russian leadership to behave in a certain way. Loose talk about what sort of nuclear weapons might be acceptable to ‘send a message’ also risked undermining the nuclear taboo. And finally, there is still no consensus on what constitutes a tactical nuclear weapon. Battlefield or tactical weapons (as opposed to strategic weapons) are delivered over shorter distances and are smaller than strategic weapons, but beyond that, there is significant variability in yield, depending on the delivery method. The U.S., for example, has tactical weapons ranging from a fraction of 1kt to 170kt. The bomb that fell on Hiroshima was 15kt. It would be beyond insulting to the memory of the estimated 70,000 people who died immediately and the many tens of thousands of hibakusha who have lived with the consequences of that bomb to suggest that this was just a small, tactical weapon.
The responses
There is, however, room for hope in the official responses by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other nuclear weapons states to Mr. Putin’s sabre-rattling and the subsequent speculation. The U.S. was at the forefront on this, and what it did do is as important as what it did not do. Washington made it abundantly clear that any nuclear use would be met with a very strong and commensurate response. However, it did not specify that that response would be nuclear: quite the opposite, as it emphasised a calibrated, conventional response to any nuclear adventurism at NATO’s doorstep.
The U.S. also did not change its nuclear preparedness, thereby not fuelling the nuclear speculation building up in Europe. Crucially, in November, even China’s President Xi Jinping called on the international community to ‘jointly oppose the use of, or threats to use, nuclear weapons’.
That nuclear crisis passed, but the world could still be held hostage to Russia’s movement of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, at Minsk’s invitation. Like Ukraine, Belarus gave up its nuclear weapons in the 1990s in return for security guarantees from Russia, the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Reversing that agreement now seems a pointless provocation — high on symbolism and risk.
At the height of the Cold War, there were almost 70,000 nuclear weapons scattered around the globe, either in storage or deployed, some on hair trigger warnings. That we avoided a nuclear exchange is down in part to the lessons of Hiroshima, and in part to sheer, dumb luck, as the history of near misses throughout the Cold War demonstrates.
As an insurance policy, it is not much.
Priyanjali Malik is the author of India’s Nuclear Debate: Exceptionalism and the Bomb
