We Need to Relearn What We’d Hoped to Forget
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In the Beginning, there was the Bomb. Humankind learned how to split atoms, and then we learned how to contain those splitting atoms just long enough to make them explode. And then the United States dropped two bombs on Japan.
The bombs of 1945 represented the advent of a new age, in which nuclear weapons would lurk behind even the smallest conflicts. But they also brought to an end centuries of assumptions about war; as Bernard Brodie wrote a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sheer power of nuclear arms meant “the end of strategy as we have known it,” because of the inability to match any political goal to the devastation of a nuclear war.
This new age also created a new priesthood of nuclear experts and strategists, people who dealt every day with the arcane and the unthinkable. (For a brief time, I was one of them.) These experts advised the policy makers who would have to make terrifying decisions; their terms and concepts—assured destruction, first strike, secure second-strike capability—would, especially during moments of crisis, make their way into the public mind.
When the Cold War ended, we collectively decided to stop thinking about things like nuclear strategy. So did governments; as Michael Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said in
