The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

Yet the secrecy surrounding these programs obscures most public debate about the wisdom of using them, or the risks inherent in losing control of them. The government’s silence about America’s new arsenal, and its implications, poses a sharp contrast to the first decades of the nuclear era. The horrific scenes of destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only seared the national psyche, but they made America’s destructive capabilities—and soon Russia’s and China’s—obvious and undeniable. Yet even while the government kept the details classified—how to build atomic weapons, where they are stored, and who has the authority to order their launch—America engaged in a decades-long political debate about when to threaten to use the Bomb and whether to ban it. Those arguments ended up in a very different place from where they began: in the 1950s the United States talked casually about dropping atomic weapons to end the Korean War; by the eighties there was a national consensus that the US would reach for nuclear weapons only if our national survival was at stake.