Why taboo on nuclear weapons is fading, 80 years after Hiroshima
The purpose of the 1945 British mission to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not to document a holocaust; it was to prevent a repeat. What would happen when such bombs hit other cities, including London? The assumption was they must.
Exactly 80 years on, incredibly, they haven't. Why? The easy answer is mad — mutually assured destruction. And that explains why the USSR and Nato never went to war. It doesn't explain why, say, the US didn't recently hit Iran's nuclear bunker with a small thermonuclear device, despite it being in the middle of nowhere. Or why a tactical weapon wasn't used in Korea or Vietnam — when there were no qualms about dropping vast quantities of conventional explosives — or Ukraine today.
• Japan offers silent prayers 80 years after devastation of Hiroshima
No, as Nina Tannenwald, a US political scientist, argued, there is another, more human, factor. Nuclear weapons became taboo. Taboos are things you just don't do. Cannibalism, for instance. We don't debate whether someone might be more acceptable to eat if, say, they were just run over by a bus.
Neither do we look at nuclear attacks on a case by case basis. There may be situations when tactical nuclear weapons could be militarily useful, even proportionate. We don't countenance it.
To see the taboo, consider a poll this week by YouGov: 56 per cent of UK respondents thought conventional bombings of cities in the Second World War were justified, yet only 26 per cent thought the nuclear attacks were.
Why? Was it more moral to become a human torch during Operation Gomorrah, when at least 34,000 Hamburg civilians died in a literal tornado of fire, than become a shadow on a Nagasaki pavement?
• How Times readers debated the morality of the Hiroshima bomb
The taboo, though, may be weakening. Oxford researchers found that if you change the questions, you get different answers. Imagine terrorists are planning an atrocity from an isolated bunker. Do you attack conventionally, or with nuclear? With both equally likely to succeed, 12 per cent chose nuclear. If nuclear was twice as likely to succeed, 56 per cent said nuke 'em. Why did the US not do just that in Iran?
And yet, there is an oddity about nuclear weapons. In isolation, they can be just another tool. In multiple? They are worse than we ever thought. In 2022 the journal Nature Food analysed the effects of a small nuclear war between India and Pakistan. It would, unsurprisingly, be bad for them: 50 million killed. But here's the more troubling statistic: it would be worse for us. As the soot blocked the sun, around the world one billion would starve.
• The Times View: The nuclear attack on Hiroshima reminds us of human folly
That there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945 is perhaps the greatest achievement of global diplomacy. But 80 years from now? Those who remember Hiroshima are dying out. The countries seeking nuclear weapons are increasing.
Speak to nuclear theorists and the worry is not merely that nuclear weapons are used somewhere and it's horrific. It's that they are used somewhere and, as is perfectly possible, it's not horrific enough. Because then the taboo is gone. And it won't come back.
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