In August the world will solemnly mark the 50th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their devastation in 1945 inaugurated an age fraught with doomsday anxieties: the fear of Armageddon, of uncontrolled proliferation, and, more recently, of nuclear terrorism. Yet even before the Cold War began to fade, many countries were quietly retreating from the nuclear temptation. Mitchell Reiss explains why - and what can be done to encourage the trend.
Half a century ago, World War II ended in two blazing flashes of heat, light, and devastation. The radioactive clouds that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those two fateful days in August 1945 cast a dark shadow over what historian John Lewis Gaddis has called "the long peace" that followed. Within seven years, the United States tested a fusion device 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic explosive that flattened Hiroshima and killed more than 100,000 Japanese. By then, the Soviet Union also possessed its own atomic bomb and would soon explode a thermonuclear bomb. It seemed a foregone conclusion that many other countries, in the quest for national security and international military and technological prestige, would seek and, inevitably, obtain nuclear weapons.