Three hours after daybreak, a blinding flash ripped through the morning sky. August 6, 1945, began as a tranquil and clear day in Hiroshima. By 8:15, the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, reduced Japan’s seventh-largest city to cinders. Three days later, on 9 August, Nagasaki would suffer the same fate. For the first and only time in human history, atomic bombs were used in anger. Eighty-one years on from the atomic bombings of Japan, the uncomfortable truth is that nuclear weapons are the reason that World War Three has been avoided.

Because nuclear weapons were part of the equation, those crises eventually de-escalated

Because nuclear weapons were part of the equation, those crises eventually de-escalated

Yet according to the latest survey on nuclear weapons by the Pew Research Center, 69 per cent of the American public thinks that they make the world less safe. The reality is that the world would be a much more dangerous place without the Bomb.

The general public’s disdain for nuclear weapons is understandable. Nuclear weapons evoke images of mushroom clouds, fireballs in the sky, and vaporised tropical islands. The 110,000 instantaneous deaths inflicted by Little Boy and Fat Man still haunt the memory of post-war generations. Only 35 per cent of Americans believe that the August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, compared to 85 per cent in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks.

However, the advent of nuclear weapons was a game-changer for the way that great power military strategists and politicians approached warfare. A shift that emphasised restraint as opposed to warfighting.

In the pre-nuclear age, heated disputes over territories and interests were settled on the battlefield. Until 1945, the main preoccupation of great-power military establishments was figuring out how to win wars. Since 1945, as the seminal nuclear deterrence theorist Bernard Brodie once........

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