Following their first meeting in Geneva in 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev issued a historic joint statement stating their shared belief that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The maxim lived on. The Geneva summit turned out to be a key milestone in the beginning of the end of the Cold War arms race. Nearly four decades later in 2022, leaders of the world’s five main nuclear powers — the US, Russia, China, France, and the UK — issued another joint statement, affirming that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and that their arsenals are meant to “serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war.”

The thinking behind the phrase is that these weapons are so destructive — with potential consequences that include the literal destruction of human civilization — that it makes no sense to talk about “victory” in a nuclear war.

It’s a powerful idea. But do the nuclear powers really believe it?

As the world marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week, it’s clear that the world is entering a new nuclear age, characterized by increasing tension between superpowers, China’s growing arsenal, and the rising possibility that more countries will acquire the bomb.

And judging from the nations’ actions and strategy documents — as opposed to their declarations at summits — we are also in an era in which nuclear powers do believe they can win a nuclear war and want to be prepared to do so.

Recent years have seen threats of Russia using a “tactical” nuclear weapon in Ukraine and a military conflict between India and Pakistan that US officials believed could have gone nuclear. The governments making these threats aren’t suicidal; if they were contemplating nuclear use, it’s because they thought it would help them win. In response to growing threats, the United States has been updating its own doctrine and arsenals to provide more options for a so-called limited nuclear war. Looming over it all is the danger of war between the US and China, a conflict that would be fought under the nuclear shadow.

The idea that there can be a winner in a nuclear exchange rests on several assumptions: that the conflict can be contained, that it won’t inevitably escalate into an all-out exchange that sees whole cities or countries wiped out, and that there will be anyone left alive to claim victory.

Some experts claim that as long as the potential for nuclear war exists, we’d be foolish not to plan for how to win one as quickly and with as little destruction to ourselves as possible. Others say the idea that a nuclear war could be kept “limited” is a dangerous notion that only makes such a war — and the risk that it could escalate to something not so limited — more likely.

A long-running debate: MAD vs. NUTS

The bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people, depending on estimates, but both cities are once again thriving metropolises today. Despite the fears of some of the scientists involved in developing the bombs, they did not ignite the atmosphere and kill all life on Earth. They did play a significant role — though there continues to be a debate about just how significant it was — in ending World War II. The only time nuclear weapons were used in war, the side that used them won the war.

But the difference then was that only one country had the weapons. Today, there are nine nuclear-armed countries with more than 12,000 nuclear weapons between them, and most of those are far more powerful than the ones used on Japan in 1945. The W76 warhead, the most common nuclear weapon in the US arsenal, is about five times more powerful than “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki.

When most people imagine what a war using these weapons would look like, images of armageddon — annihilated cities, radiation fallout, nuclear winter — come to mind. Popular depictions of nuclear war, from Dr. Strangelove to the Terminator movies to last year’s chilling quasi-novel Nuclear War: A Scenario, soon to be adapted into a film, tend to focus on the worst-case scenarios.

The apocalyptic possibilities have, for decades, motivated global campaigns to ban nuclear weapons and haunted many of the world leaders who would have to make the decisions that would set them in motion. That includes Donald Trump, who has described what he calls “nuclear warming” as the “biggest problem we have in the whole world.”

If there could be a silver lining to the fact that humanity has built weapons capable of destroying itself, it’s that this fear has made those weapons much less likely to be used. “Mutually Assured........

© Vox