The Myths Behind the Romantic Faith in the Bomb

Image: Checubus / shutterstock.com

The first time an atomic bomb was used in war was on 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima. The last time it was used was three days later in Nagasaki. The simplest explanation for why nuclear weapons have not been used again in the 80 years since 1945, despite the presence of tens of thousands of warheads in American and Soviet arsenals at peak numbers in the 1980s, is that they are essentially unusable.

Their spread to a total of nine countries today, and the spell they cast on the leaders and scientists of many other countries who are enchanted by the magic of the bomb, rests on several mutually reinforcing myths, the first of which is that they won the war for the Allies in the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War. Policymakers, analysts, and pundits have widely internalised the belief that Japan surrendered in 1945 because of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Robert Billard provided a succinct overview recently of how several contemporaneous US policymakers and senior military officers believed that the atomic bombings were of dubious military value in ending the war but were profoundly unethical. The key question, nonetheless, is not what Americans believed but what motivated Japanese policymakers to surrender. An alternative analytical framework strongly reinforces Billard’s thesis that the bomb was not the decisive factor in Japan’s decision to surrender. In addition to the atomic bombings, Moscow broke its neutrality pact to attack Japan on the 9^th. Tokyo announced the surrender on 15 August.

The evidence is surprisingly clear that the close chronology between the bombings and Japan’s surrender was a coincidence. By early August, Japan’s leaders knew that the war was lost. In their minds the decisive factor in unconditional surrender was the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific war against the essentially undefended northern approaches and Japanese apprehensions that Stalin’s Soviet Union would be the occupying power unless they surrendered to America first. That fateful decision determined not just which foreign power occupied Japan but the entire geopolitical map of the post-war Pacific during and through to the end of the Cold War.

The second myth is the related belief, internalised by both sides, that the bomb kept the tense peace in the Cold War. Yet, no evidence exists to show that during the Cold War, either the Soviet bloc or NATO had the intention to attack the other at any time, but was deterred from doing so because of nuclear weapons held by the other side. How do we assess the relative weight and potency of nuclear weapons, West European integration and West European democratisation as competing explanatory variables in that long peace? What is beyond dispute is that the Soviet Union’s dramatic territorial expansion across Eastern and Central Europe behind Red Army lines took place in the years of US atomic monopoly, 1945–49; and that the Soviet Union imploded and retreated from Eastern Europe after, although not because of, gaining strategic parity.

After the Cold War, the existence of nuclear weapons on both sides was not enough to stop the US from expanding NATO’s borders to Russia’s borders, stop Russia from annexing Crimea in 2014 and invading Ukraine last year, prevent NATO from rearming Ukraine, or the latter from launching deadly attacks deep in Russian territory.

Third, nuclear deterrence is far from being fail-safe. The world has so far averted a nuclear catastrophe as much owing to good luck as to wise management, with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis being the most graphic example. A prospective Russia–NATO war is only one of five potential nuclear flashpoints, albeit the one with the gravest consequences. The remaining four are all in the Indo-Pacific: China–US, China–India, Korean Peninsula, and India–Pakistan. A simple transposition of the dyadic North Atlantic framework to comprehend the multiplex Indo-Pacific nuclear relations is analytically flawed and entails policy dangers for managing nuclear stability.

For nuclear peace to hold, deterrence and fail-safe mechanisms must work every single time. For nuclear Armageddon, deterrence or fail-safe mechanisms need to break down only once. Deterrence stability depends on rational decision-makers being always in office on all sides: a not very reassuring precondition in the age of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. It depends equally critically on there being not one rogue launch, human error, or system malfunction: an impossibly high bar. In fact the world has come frighteningly close many times to nuclear war owing to misperceptions, miscalculations, near misses, and accidents.

The fourth myth is that the bomb is a necessary safeguard against nuclear blackmail. But the belief that nuclear weapons permit a state to deploy coercive bargaining power that would not otherwise be available also has little evidence in history. There is not one clear-cut instance of a non-nuclear state having been bullied into changing its behaviour by the overt or implicit threat of being bombed by nuclear weapons, including Ukraine.

The normative taboo against this most indiscriminately inhumane weapon ever invented is so comprehensive and robust that under no conceivable circumstance will its use against a non-nuclear country compensate for the political costs. Some studies suggest that the normative taboo against nuclear weapons use may be weakening among Americans. But there remains a strong belief amongst those regularly engaged with the world’s nuclear policymakers that the taboo remains robust among decision-makers.

Nuclear powers accepted defeat at the hands of non-nuclear states rather than escalate armed conflict to the nuclear level in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Their territories were invaded in some instances by non-nuclear states: the Falkland Islands in the 1980s and Russia’s Kursk region by Ukraine more recently. The biggest elements of caution in attacking North Korea for its repeated provocations are not nuclear weapons, but its formidable conventional capability to hit heavily populated parts of South Korea, including Seoul, and anxiety about how China would respond.

The fifth myth is the sacralised efficacy of nuclear deterrence. Nuclear weapons cannot be used for defence against nuclear-armed rivals with second-strike retaliatory capability without resulting in mutual national suicide. In fact, deterrence is suspect in any possible combination of rival dyads involving nuclear, middle, and minor powers. Possession of the bomb may raise the bar for the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the adversary, but does not rule it out. Why else would nuclear-armed Israel fear the acquisition of the bomb by Iran as an existential threat? Conversely, those who profess faith in the essential logic of nuclear deterrence should support the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran in order to contribute to the peace and stability of the Middle East.

In conclusion, the extreme destructiveness of nuclear weapons does not translate into military or political utility. Rather, it makes them qualitatively different in political and moral terms from other weapons, to the point of rendering them virtually unusable. Norms, not deterrence, have anathematised the use of nuclear weapons as unacceptable, immoral and possibly illegal under any circumstance. And the normative barrier against use has been buttressed by the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Related articles:

A Sceptic’s Take on the Nuclear Bomb (this is an extended version of this article) (10-minute read)

Europe's New Bellicism: Rearmament in a Frenzy (3-minute read)

Towards a Eurobomb: The Costs of Nuclear Sovereignty (3-minute read)

The Challenge of Nuclear Weapons to the UN Security Council: Adapt or Die (3-minute read)

Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general, is emeritus professor at the Australian National University and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He is a former Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute and editor of The nuclear ban treaty: a transformational reframing of the global nuclear order.