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C o n c l u s i o n The Price of Nuclear Peace The enemy’s an age—a nuclear age. It happens to have killed man’s faith in his ability to influence what happens to him. And out of this comes a sickness, and out of sickness a frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness. —From Seven Days in May, 1965 One nuclear war is going to be the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don’t think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing. But I’m not at all sure that there are very many people who look on this as being as terribly dangerous as I do, so I may be exaggerating the whole thing. But I just don’t think we can tolerate it. —Lawrence Eagleburger, 2009 The Nuclear Legacy: From Fear to Apathy The subject of nuclear weapons breeds both apathy and dread at the same time. During the Cold War, most people did not want to think about the realities of the nuclear age, especially since there was nothing that the average American (or Soviet) could have done about nuclear arms. The nuclear standoff of the late twentieth century was unavoidable, the alchemic result of a collision between a technological discovery and an ideological conflict, and it could not be exited with any sense of safety until the Cold War itself was somehow settled. Then as now, people cannot be blamed for feeling helpless about nuclear arms. The human imagination fails when confronted with the idea of Conclusion 171 a war in which a hundred cities or more cease to exist within hours of the outbreak of hostilities. While it is possible to write words like ‘‘40 million casualties,’’ no one really has any idea what those words mean, or what 40 million people killed and injured in less than a day would actually look like. Thinking about it at all seems a futile and tiring expenditure of emotion and intellect. People cannot live in a state of perpetual anxiety. Accordingly, each succeeding generation of Americans since the end of World War II found its own way to reach an accommodation with the nuclear age. Many of the veterans of World War II felt their lives were saved by the use of nuclear weapons, especially those (like a young George Shultz at the time) who were getting ready to ship out for the invasion of Japan in 1945.1 Later, the men and women who fought the Cold War during the 1960s and 1970s grimly accepted the ‘‘balance of terror’’ as the price of global peace. In the 1980s, the Americans gambled on an escalation of the arms race against a failing Soviet opponent, a huge risk whose wisdom will be debated for years to come but whose outcome seemed to vindicate its supporters. Today, younger people untouched by the Cold War see more nuclear danger in the meltdown of one power plant in Japan than in thousands of nuclear bombs. The end of the Cold War, however, resolved nothing about nuclear weapons. There will never be a way to define with any precision the role that nuclear deterrence played in the peaceful end of the East-West conflict, since partisans of every school of thought, from MAD theorists to antinuclear activists, are all convinced that the peaceful end of the Cold War confirmed their preexisting beliefs. It was humanity’s salvation that a Soviet-American nuclear war never took place, but we will never really know why it did not happen. It is impossible to prove a negative. And so at the outset of the twenty-first century, there is still no agreement about the ultimate meaning or purpose of nuclear weapons. All sides in this debate, however, are right about one thing: the costs of any one of them being wrong would be ghastly. If nuclear disarmament invites war, then the central tenet of nuclear deterrence will be proved in the most violent way possible. The nuclear abolitionists will have created the conditions for the outcomes they feared the most, as arms reductions lower the bar to conflict and a major war finally breaks out, perhaps even with the nuclear bombs they were hoping to eradicate. But if the advocates of traditional nuclear deterrence are wrong, and the costs and risks of using nuclear weapons are far greater than they calculated...

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