Origins of the Nuclear Taboo

I heavily discount Russian threats to deploy nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its allies should the latter intervene militarily in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. That's not to say Vladimir Putin is dishonest or insincere in his threats (just bluffing). His rocket-test saber-rattling rightfully sows fear in countries involved in the conflict.

It's more I don't believe nuclear weapons are usable in the current day and age. Nuclear deterrence doctrines are so well-developed it'd be national suicide for a state to launch a first strike against the U.S. (and other nuclear armed states with concomitant deterrence capabilities.) But there's more: Since 1945 it's been, how do you say?, politically incorrect to use nukes. The international moral prohibitions and political consequences of first use of are overwhelming.

An entire "peace movement" developed during the Cold War to stigmatize and delegitimize states possessing nuclear weapons --- and protest activism worked as a powerfully constraint on the deployment of strategic capabilities. Popular culture, and especially the 1983 film, "The Day After," bombarded, if you will, the U.S. population with completely real and terrifying images of nuclear holocaust. The endless debates on nuclear war among state leaders, diplomats, and the military sector, severely complicated political decision-making. 

During the 1950s, when France fought an anti-colonial war in Vietnam, the notion of deploying the bomb horrified President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who exclaimed, "You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against the Asians for the second time in ten years. My God." Nuclear use is, basically, "racist." Atomic bombs were dropped on Japan --- not Germany --- to bring about the end of World War II. While it was the necessities of wartime planning and strategy that dictated the U.S. decision on when and where to drop the bomb, wartime diplomacy and U.S. peace efforts failed to induce Japan to surrender in 1945. At the time, fear of "Japs" and the "Yellow Peril" conditioned public acceptance of dropping the bomb on the Japanese people. The emperor gave us no choice. 

Over time there developed a powerful normative prohibition on the use of nukes, known as the "nuclear taboo." This concept is tested by ideational and normative theories of international politics. See, Nina Tennenwald, "Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo":

In 1958 Lt. Gen. James Gavin, a principal promoter in the U.S. military of the development of tactical nuclear weapons, wrote, “Nuclear weapons will become conventional for several reasons, among them cost, effectiveness against enemy weapons, and ease of handling.” Indeed, during the 1950s numerous U.S. leaders fully expected that a nuclear weapon would become “just another weapon.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles accepted “the ultimate inevitability” that tactical nuclear weapons would gain “conventional” status. Adm. Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Dwight Eisenhower, predicted in 1956 that the use of nuclear weapons “would become accepted throughout the world just as soon as people could lay their hands upon them.”

These leaders were articulating a view with a long tradition in the history of weapons and warfare: a weapon once introduced inevitably comes to be widely accepted as legitimate. In reality, however, nuclear weapons have come to be defined as abhorrent and unacceptable weapons of mass destruction, with a taboo on their use. This taboo is associated with a widespread revulsion toward nuclear weapons and broadly held inhibitions on their use. The opprobrium has come to apply to all nuclear weapons, not just to large bombs or to certain types or uses of nuclear weapons. It has developed to the point that uses of nuclear weapons that were once considered plausible by at least some U.S. decision makers—for example, tactical battlefield uses in limited wars and direct threats to deter enemies from conventional attack—have been severely delegitimized and are practically unthinkable policy options. Thomas Schelling has argued that “the evolution of that status [nuclear taboo] has been as important as the development of nuclear arsenals.” Evidence suggests that the taboo has helped to constrain resort to the use of nuclear weapons since 1945 both by reinforcing deterrence and by inducing restraint even in cases where deterrence did not operate.

What gave rise to this taboo? Schelling attributes the taboo to a general sense of revulsion associated with such destructive weapons and the perception that nuclear weapons have come to be viewed as different.6 He does not, however, trace the evolution of this process. Historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued that moral considerations help to explain the nonuse of nuclear weapons by the United States in the first ten years of the Cold War, but he does not specifically connect this sentiment to the development of a taboo.

Within the field of international relations, there has been little systematic analysis of the nuclear taboo. Traditional realists, of course, would be skeptical of the existence of a taboo, tending to see it as largely indistinguishable from prudential behavior. To the extent that a tradition of nonuse existed, it would reflect the interests of the most powerful (nuclear) states. Rationalist approaches, which are often sympathetic to norms, could easily incorporate the existence of a taboo. They would emphasize the uniquely destructive nature of nuclear weapons, the impossibility of defense, and therefore the (obvious) of having a social convention on their use.

As I show in this article, although there is some truth to these explanations, they are inadequate. The nuclear taboo was pursued in part against the preferences of the United States, which, for the first part of the nuclear era, opposed creation of a taboo because it would deny the self-proclaimed right of the United States to rely on nuclear weapons for its security. I argue for a broader explanation that emphasizes the role of a global antinuclear weapons movement and nonnuclear states, as well as Cold War power politics, in the development of the taboo.

The model of norm creation here highlights the role of antinuclear discourse and politics in the creation of the taboo. Although rationalist variables are important, the taboo cannot be explained simply as the straightforward result of rational adaptation to strategic circumstances. The larger questions are: where do global norms come from? How and why do they develop? And how are they maintained, disseminated, and strengthened? The case of the nuclear taboo is important theoretically because it challenges conventional views that international norms, especially in the security area, are created mainly by and for the powerful. The case is important practically because it illuminates an important source of restraint on the use of nuclear weapons.

In this article I locate the origins of the nuclear taboo after 1945 in a set of domestic and international factors and trace its subsequent development. Elsewhere I have analyzed how the taboo has influenced U.S. decision making in specific instances, but here I focus on what accounts for the rise of the taboo and how it developed in global politics and U.S. policy. Ideally, a full account require an examination of how the taboo came to be accepted and internalized in the decision making of other countries as well. The central role of the United States in the development of the taboo, however, makes it a particularly significant case...

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