‘A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again’, these were the words which President Trump used on 7 April 2026 in what was widely believed to be a veiled threat of using nuclear weapons to annihilate Iran. This casual invocation of civilisation destruction is not limited to ‘Trumpian demagogy’, but rather reveals a deeper desensitisation towards nuclear weapons. The normalisation of this discourse represents an existential threat to humanity and challenges the status of atomic bombs as an ‘unthinkable weapon’. The use of nuclear coercion as an instrument of state policy represents a slippery slope towards the normalisation of nuclear threats which may ultimately spiral into an all-out nuclear war.

On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb against Imperial Japan. The effects were devastating, 78,000 in Hiroshima and 40,000 people in Nagasaki died instantly. The aftermath of the nuclear bombing led to an additional death of 90,000 people, who suffered from widespread buns, radiation sickness, genetic mutation of unborn infants and physical injuries. This episode deeply shocked the world and started a flurry of weapons regime and arms control initiatives, which gradually lost steam in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. The post-Cold War generation has........

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