We Need to Relearn What We’d Hoped to Forget

Tom Nichols: “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… 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… Now here we are again, trying to make our way around nuclear terms and concepts as war rages in the middle of Europe.”