The morning of August 6, 1945, dawned clear and sunny as the Enola Gay wheeled over Hiroshima and dropped its payload on the city centre. The 15kt uranium bomb exploded 600 metres above the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, instantly flattening everything and everyone below. Only the skeletal structure of the hall remained, bearing witness to the moment when our beliefs about weapons and wars changed.
The concept of deterrence
In the intervening 78 years, we have witnessed the rise and fall of nuclear threats. The concept of nuclear deterrence attracted the sharpest minds in countries that both possessed nuclear weapons and abjured them. Especially as nuclear weapons became more powerful, it became clear that any nuclear use would be a global problem. This allowed a parallel development to occur: even as nuclear weapons states developed ever more destructive nukes, a taboo against their actual use began to develop. The political scientist Nina Tannenwald has defined the nuclear taboo as a coalescing norm against using nuclear weapons because these weapons are seen as so beyond the pale that there are almost no circumstances in which their use can be justified. Crucially, this taboo extends across the whole class of weapons, regardless of their yield, leading to a blanket prohibition of use that each passing year reinforces. However, this taboo has no legal basis; it rests on ideas of morality, proportionality and responsibility.
