The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

As Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod write in To Win a Nuclear War, the secretary of the army, Kenneth Claiborne Royall, “spoke for the hard-liners when he said, ‘We have been spending 98 percent of all the money for atomic energy for weapons. Now if we aren’t going to use them, that doesn’t make any sense.’” Some wanted to rely on a strategy that would eventually become known as deterrence.* For deterrence to work, however, the side being deterred must truly believe that these weapons will be used against it. This meant that any nation seeking to lean on deterrence couldn’t ever publicly say anything like, “These weapons are awful, and we’ll never use them.” Yet this is exactly what the United States had said right after the war in 1945. Was the United States ready to blow up Russian cities and slaughter so many of its people if Stalin called its bluff? If he did call the bluff, and the United States backed down, its future ability to use atomic bombs as a threat would be greatly diminished—and thereby the value of its nuclear arsenal, too. This is a conundrum that would outlive most of the officials debating it in 1948.