of Cain for generations to come.”201 The physicist Alvin Weinberg, whose research helped make the bomb possible, asked in 1985:Are we witnessing a gradual sanctification of Hiroshima—that is, the elevation of Hiroshima to the status of a profoundly mystical event, an event ultimately of the same religious force as biblical events? I cannot prove it, but I am convinced that the 40th Anniversary of Hiroshima, with its vast outpouring of concern, bears resemblance to the observance of major religious holidays.... This sanctification of Hiroshima is one of the most hopeful developments of the nuclear era.202
The nuclear taboo emerged only gradually. As we saw in chapter 1, for at least a decade after Hiroshima many Americans thought the A-bomb was adorable. By 1953 John Foster Dulles, secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration, was deploring what he called the “false distinction” and “taboo” surrounding nuclear weapons.203 During a 1955 crisis involving Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, Eisenhower said, “In any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.”204
But in the following decade nuclear weapons acquired a stigma that would put such statements beyond the pale. It began to sink in that the weapons’ destructive capacity was of a different order from anything in history, that they violated any conception of proportionality in the waging of war, and that plans for civil defense (like backyard fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills) were a travesty. People became aware that lingering radiation from nuclear fallout could cause chromosome damage and cancer for decades after the actual explosions. The fallout from atmospheric tests had already contaminated rainfall all over the world with strontium 90, a radioactive isotope resembling calcium that is taken up in the bones and teeth of children (inspiring Malvina Reynolds’s protest song “What Have They Done to the Rain?”).
Though the United States and the USSR continued to develop nuclear technology at a breakneck pace, they began, however hypocritically, to pay homage to nuclear disarmament in conferences and statements. At the same time a grassroots movement began to stigmatize the weapons. Demonstrations and petitions attracted millions of citizens, together with public figures such as Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Schweitzer. The mounting pressure helped nudge the superpowers to a moratorium and then a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing, and then to a string of arms-control agreements. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was a tipping point. Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the change to demonize Goldwater in the Daisy ad and called attention to the categorical boundary in a 1964 public statement: “Make no mistake. There is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon. For nineteen peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.”205
As the world’s luck held out, and the two nuclear-free decades grew to three and four and five and six, the taboo fed on itself in the runaway process by which norms become common knowledge. The use of nuclear weapons was unthinkable because everyone knew it was unthinkable, and everyone knew that everyone knew it. The fact that wars both large (Vietnam) and small (Falklands) were not deterred by the increasingly ineffectual nuclear threat was a small price to pay for the indefinite postponement of Armageddon.
A norm that rests only on mutual recognition of that norm is, of course, vulnerable to a sudden unraveling. One might worry—one should worry—that nuclear nations outside the club of great powers, such as India, Pakistan, North Korea, and perhaps soon Iran, may not be party to the common understanding that the use of nuclear weapons is unthinkable. Worse, a terrorist organization that pilfered a stray nuclear weapon could make a point of defying the taboo, since the whole point of international terrorism is to shock the world with the most horrific spectacle imaginable. Once the precedent of a single nuclear explosion was set, one might worry, all restraints would be put aside. A pessimist might argue that even if the Long Peace has not, thus far, depended on nuclear deterrence, it is an ephemeral hiatus. It will surely end as nuclear weapons proliferate, a maniac from the developing world brings the lucky streak to an end, and the taboo comes undone among small and great powers alike.
No judicious person can feel calm about the parlous state of nuclear safety in