The nuclear age has held for eighty years on two emotions: the dread of one’s own annihilation, and the horror of the innocent’s. Tehran keeps showing it feels neither.

For eighty years, the most important fact about nuclear weapons has not been that so few nations built them. It is that no nation used them. Nine states now hold arsenals; at the height of the Cold War the two superpowers alone stockpiled tens of thousands of warheads. Every one of those weapons sat through crises that offered a reason to fire, and not once, since 1945, did anyone reach for the button against another state.

That restraint is often mistaken for cold calculation, as though deterrence were a chess problem the powers solved on paper. It was never only that. At its root it was emotional. What stayed every hand for eighty years was dread, the visceral refusal to be the one who unleashed the unthinkable.

You can watch that dread work in the historical record. In October 1962, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev stood closer to nuclear war than any two men before or since, each with the power to end the other’s world. And each, at the edge, flinched.

On October 26, at the height of the standoff, Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy a letter Robert Kennedy would call “very long and emotional.” In it, the Soviet premier who had provoked the crisis pleaded for a way down.

He warned: “If you and I pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, then the more we pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot.” Those are not the words of a strategist angling for leverage. That is raw, unvarnished dread.

Even Harry Truman is a case apart precisely because he acted before that fear could fully exist. No one had yet seen the wake of a nuclear weapon, the melted cities, the shadows burned into stone, the slow death that followed the blast for years.

Yet, once the reports from Hiroshima and Nagasaki arrived, Truman himself was profoundly shaken. Horrified by the sheer scale of civilian casualties, he halted further atomic strikes, haunted by the thought of killing “all those kids.” After those two days, the whole world saw the true face of the nuclear bomb, and the........

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