4 days ago
How We Avoided World War III
The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 80 years ago this week is something to commemorate but not celebrate. It was also the beginning of a new era: the Atomic Age. Growing up in the latter stages of the Cold War, my generation didn't live with the sense of menace and the Bert the Turtle duck-and-cover drills baby boomers endured. But both cohorts were blessed by the absence of a large-scale war, conventional or nuclear, between the US and the Soviet Union.
Which brings up an 80-year-old question: Did the development of atomic weapons keep the peace during the Cold War? And if so, what accounts for this paradoxical result? The simple answer is the unsatisfying one: It's complicated.
