16 The Economist June 4th 2 022
BriefingThe nuclear taboo
I
n 1999 nina tannenwald, a political
scientist at Brown University, wrote a pa-
per analysing something she had observed
among generals, politicians and strat-
egists: the “nuclear taboo”. This was not,
she argued, simply a matter of general
queasiness or personal moral qualms; it
had important consequences. The lack of
nuclear wars in the years since America’s
destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
she argued, was not simply a matter of de-
terrence. It had also relied on a growing
sense of the innate wrongness of nuclear
weapons putting their use beyond the pale.
Threats of nuclear attack like those
made in the 1940s and 1950s had become
vanishingly rare. As the taboo had
strengthened, seeking to acquire nuclear
weapons had come to be seen as the mark
of a barbarian. Avoiding any explicit men-
tion of actually using the ones you already
had was the mark of a gentleman. If there
was a certain hypocrisy about all this—
which there was—it was one that exempli-
fied the French aphorist La Rochefou-
cauld’s definition of the term: the tribute
that vice pays to virtue.To see such nicety stripped away, tune
in to the state-owned television channel
Russia-1. “Just one launch, Boris,” warned
Dmitry Kiselev, the station’s main news
presenter, on May 1st, “and England is
gone.” In case this message proved too sub-
tle for the British prime minister, or the au-
dience at home, Mr Kiselev laid out the
launch options he had in mind. One was a
Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile
(icbm) shown streaking towards Britain.
Another was a Poseidon thermonuclear
torpedo, designed to whip up an isotope-
laced tsunami. “Having passed over the
British Isles, it will turn whatever might be
left of them into a radioactive desert,” en-
thused Mr Kiselev, “unfit for anything for a
long time.”
This was not a one-off. “The Russians
are really brandishing this,” says Dr Tan-
nenwald. “Every few days, some Russian
official is making explicit nuclear threats.”
And such thinking runs deeper than
broadcast bombast. Boris Bondarev, a dip-
lomat at Russia’s mission to the unin Ge-
neva, resigned his post on May 23rd in dis-
gust at his country’s invasion of Ukraine.He told the New York Timesthat what had
disturbed him most was the glib fashion in
which his colleagues—arms-control spe-
cialists, no less—revelled in talk of nuclear
war. “They think that if you hit some vil-
lage in America with a nuclear strike, then
the Americans will immediately get scared
and run to beg for mercy on their knees,”
said Mr Bondarev. “That’s how many of our
people think, and I fear that this is the line
that they are passing along to Moscow.”
The mixture of norms, treaties, mutual
assurances, blandishments, suasion, tech-
nical mechanisms, fear and taboo which
has kept the world from seeing nuclear
weapons used against armies or cities
since 1945 was looking pretty ragged even
before Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president,
warned on February 24th that third parties
standing in Russia’s way risked “conse-
quences...such as you have never seen in
your entire history”.
In terms of arms control, pacts between
America and Russia had almost all lapsed;
Russia was developing new weapons, such
as Poseidon, not covered by the agree-
ments that remain; China’s nuclear arsenal
was expanding rapidly. As to stopping the
weapons’ spread, decades of international
pressure had failed to prevent North Korea
first from acquiring nuclear weapons and
then from increasing both their sophisti-
cation and the range of targets against
which they could be used.
The single non-proliferation agree-
ment of note made in the past decade, the
jcpoadeal in which Iran limited its nuclearThe war in Ukraine is unlikely to go nuclear. But it is increasing the risk that
future conflicts willThinking the unthinkable