Americans Aren’t as Averse to Using Nuclear Weapons as You Might Think

With U.S.-North Korea tensions heightened after weeks of fiery and furious rhetoric from President Trump and Kim Jong-un—pushing the world closer to nuclear conflict than it has been in decades—it’s worth taking a breath to consider what forces have kept the world’s nuclear-armed states from irradiating and annihilating each other in a shower of bombs.

Some explanations of nuclear non-use say that nuclear weapons have become, counterintuitively, a stabilizing force on the international system. Once the U.S. and Soviet Union both developed second-strike capability—the ability to respond to a nuclear strike with one of your own—deploying nuclear weapons in the first place became rather unattractive.