![]() In the pages that follow, seven writers and experts survey the current nuclear landscape. Terms once consigned to the history books - “madman theory,” “brinkmanship” - have returned to the news cycle with frightening regularity. Increasingly, the atmosphere seems to reflect the anxious days of the Cold War, albeit with more juvenile insults and more colorful threats. The first half of that forecast has long since come to pass, and the second feels as plausible as ever. Entirely aside from the destruction of the blasts themselves, the decision thrust the world irrevocably into a high-stakes arms race - in which, as Stimson took care to warn, the technology would proliferate, evolve, and quite possibly lead to the end of modern civilization. Seventy years later, we find his reasoning unconvincing. The terms of his unrepentant apologia ( excerpt here) are now familiar to us: the risk of a dud made a demonstration too risky the human cost of a land invasion would be too high nothing short of the bomb’s awesome lethality would compel Japan to surrender. ![]() Stimson’s “ The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.” As secretary of war, Stimson had served as the chief military adviser to President Truman, and recommended the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ![]() In February 1947, Harper’s Magazine published Henry L.
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