It’s often said that nuclear weapons for all their danger have prevented and prevent major wars that otherwise would have happened resulting in millions of deaths so it’s good that they exist.
My question is considering how many close calls (that we know of) have happened and just how bad even a small scale nuclear war would be, is this really a reasonable belief?
Even if we assume without the existence of nuclear weapons the chances of the most powerful countries having a large conventional war were near certain I still don’t think this would justify even a 10% chance of nuclear war with thousands of nuclear weapons being used. My morality and my understanding of probability and risk tells me that the former is many times more preferable than the latter. As an analogy I would choose a 75% chance of my legs broken over a 15% chance of being set on fire and disemboweled. One worst case scenario is clearly much better than the other. An intense conventional war between NATO, Russia, China, etc. would still leave the participating countries completely or mostly intact while even a limited nuclear war would turn entire cities into charnel houses in a matter of hours. Even the World Wars didn’t set civilization back hundreds of years like a full scale nuclear war would. Many figures from the Cold War have explicitly stated that the US and USSR never fought a nuclear war because of luck or divine intervention. There’s no guarantee the luck will continue indefinitely. History is full of countless examples of bad luck leading to unimaginable catastrophe.
I’m open to having my mind changed but I view the idea that it’s good that the US and the USSR had thousands of nuclear weapons ready to go at a moment’s notice because it stopped conventional war as foolish and like saying it would be good if everyone had a loaded gun pointed at their head at all times because there would be much less violent crime. You’re making the world far more dangerous in the name of making things safer and only succeeding at the former. The cure is orders of magnitude worse than anything the disease could have done. I will clarify that I’m only asking about the idea that nuclear arsenals in the Cold War prevented war between the US and USSR (and prevent war today) and not whether it’s right to build nuclear weapons because your enemy has them too.
Moreover, limited conventional engagement may actually become more likely in the face of nuclear armament, since it may become reasonable to expect that an opponent (or the head of state of that opponent) might prefer to incur losses that don’t touch their ‘core territory’ rather than risking annihilation:
If our arsenal has kept even one country from launching a surprise attack in fear of total annihilation then in my mind they are justified. How do we know if they have prevented such an attack? We will never know, but there hasn’t been one yet. They would have been developed by someone eventually, so I’m glad the we developed them first. Of course there are downsides to having a nuclear stockpile spread across the US, but it’s a small price to pay if it prevents WWIII from breaking out in my lifetime.
As of today, April 2025, I would say that yes they do prevent large scale wars. Because we haven’t had one.
Without nucular weapons, I think we would have had a conventional WWIII sometime in the early 60s in Europe. We’d probably have had an India-Pakistan war, or three, a China-Russia war, and maybe we’d still be fighting in Viet nam.
And note we didn’t use nukes in Korea, though there were those that were lobbying for it.
When we actually have nukular confrontation, people can come back and correct me.
The weapons of mass destruction; nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons
They have seen some use in wars. But once the aftermath was seen, countries agreed to not use them as regular weapons and have held to that for the most part.
These things can’t be considered in a vacuum. There’s no way to talk about deterrence without talking about the fact that the USSR, a country that was able to mobilize massive conventional motorized forces, has always intended to conquer most of Eastern Europe and then probably occupy Western Europe as a buffer/fiefdom. This isn’t hypothetical; territorial expansion has always been part of Russian identity. They’re doing it right now.
As far as this:
No. Absolutely not. Setting aside the staggering cost in military casualties, both sides would also suffer unimaginable losses to their cities, even with pure conventional weaponry. Ask a German about Dresden being left “mostly intact.” Weaponry now is more precise and powerful than it was back then.
It is good and necessary for the entire free world to keep an overwhelming amount of nuclear firepower pointed directly at Russia, on a short fuse, forever. This is a hard requirement of world peace for as long as Russia exists. It sounds bleak, but the good news is they respond well to overwhelming power if it’s wieldly consistently and unambiguously. They only get sassy when we act diffident.
With your noted exception. (This isn’t the first border skirmish between them.)
One could make a case that India and Pakistan’s nukes are keeping the two countries from going fully at each other. These skirmishes in Kashmir are bad, but they’re not nuke bad. They shoot a few of each other, then go back to the status quo. Sucks to be a soldier, or live in Kashmir, but they aren’t radioactive, so far.
Without nukes, I doubt Pakistan would exist as an independent country. Without nukes, India would have missing cities from Pakistani nukes. It is better this way. So far.
For the narrow question of US & Russia née USSR as the only nuclear protagonists, the presence of the US nuclear arsenal has almost certainly prevented a major war that would have occurred by now had nukes simply not been possible as a matter of physics.
Now once we get beyond those two countries it gets vastly more complicated. And far worse for humanity.
There is no stable deterrence solution in a triangular rivalry such as Russia / US / China. Or at some future date Israel / Iran / [whoever]. Or India / Pakistan / [whoever].
The more countries have them, and the smaller / poorer those countries are, the greater the likelihood of inadvertent or unauthorized release.
Likewise, and this suddenly hits the USA real close to home, the more authoritarian or mentally unstable the head of state, the greater the likelihood of an ill-advised attack on [somebody] for [cockamamie reasons]. Or of belligerent escalation when cooler heads and conscious de-escalation are available paths to crisis resolution.
Without India having its own nukes, Pakistan would have taken their border skirmishes further and likely used nukes on targets in India. “cities” was shorthand for I don’t know if Pakistan would nuke India military targets, or Delhi.
There were large country on large country wars throughout history, until nukes were developed. The world has been relatively peaceful since WW II compared to the rest of history. European countries were constantly at war with each other, Russia and Europe, China and Japan and Korea.
If nukes haven’t prevented those large scale wars, then its a heck of a coincidence that they were developed and then the wars stopped.
If we’re talking about the current US head of state, I’m not worried he’ll start anything via a rogue attack. What I’m worried about is that because he prioritizes his own safety above all, he’ll shy away from the necessary steps in the escalation/deterrence ladder. That could paradoxically lead to an even more dangerous and unpredictable situation.
I’m thinking of the 1969 crisis where Russia was thinking of nuking China, and Nixon offered to nuke Russia’s cities if they did so. Needless to say, nobody was attacked and the crisis was averted. Without that courageous and risky intervention, the consequences would’ve been extremely dire. I’m not sure any other POTUS would’ve taken that risk, but especially not the current one.
