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Should All Nations Possess A Nuclear Deterrent?
The question was ignored because the answer was feared
Decades ago, a question was quietly posed to the international community. Would the world be safer if all nations possessed a nuclear deterrent? The answer was no, followed by another question. What if they fell into the wrong hands? But an insistence that nuclear weapons were in the “right hands” propelled the world into the nuclear age.
In 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard warned US President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the Nazis were developing a nuclear bomb. Einstein and Szilard implored Roosevelt to create nuclear weapons before Hitler.
In 1942 the United States entered World War II and started to develop nuclear weapons in the top-secret Manhattan Project. By May 1945, Hitler was dead, and Nazi Germany was defeated, but the United States was still at war with Japan, who vowed to never surrender.
By this time, US nuclear weapons were operational, but US President Harry Truman faced a moral dilemma.
Truman opposed invading Japan. The estimated loss of American lives made the invasion suicidal. Even if Truman was willing to accept the high American casualty rate, victory was still predicated on the annihilation of the Japanese population. Truman’s advisors…