Nuclear weapons, the end of the cold war, and the future of the international system
- Ohio Univ., Athens, OH (United States)
The collapse of empires, the overthrow of dynasties, the outbreak of plagues, the onset of revolutions, and even the improvement of the human condition itself - all of these are categories of events, which means that they have happened before and will almost certainly happen again. There are very few occurrences of which it can be said that nothing like them has ever taken place; but surely what took place in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, qualifies as such as occurrence. The first test explosion of an atomic bomb, together with the actual use of that weapon three weeks later against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was as sharp a break from the past as any in all of history. Theory had intersected reality to produce a weapon that was regarded at the time as unlike any other that had ever been invented, and that is still so regarded today, almost half a century later. The result, it now appears, has been a fundamental, and possibly permanent, change in human behavior. `The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking,` Albert Einstein wrote in 1946, `and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.` Einstein would have been as surprised as anyone else who lived through the early Cold War years had he known that Nagasaki would be the last occasion upon which atomic weapons would be used in anger for at least the next four and one-half decades, despite the fact that the great geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union would drag on throughout that length of time. History is full of unexpected developments, but few have been as completely unexpected as that the great powers would produce some 70,000 nuclear weapons between the end of World War II and the present day, without a single one of them having been used. Perfecting the ultimate instrument of war had made the ancient institution of war, for the first time in history, obsolete. Or so it would appear. 23 refs.
- OSTI ID:
- 105167
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 1992; Related Information: Is Part Of Nuclear weapons in the changing world: Perspectives from Europe, Asia, and North America; Garrity, P.J.; Maaranen, S.A. [eds.]; PB: 302 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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