Thomas Schelling's Nobel Prize Speech: An Astonishing Sixty Years: The Legacy of Hiroshima

Thomas C. Schelling — Prize Lecture, December 8, 2005. Source: NobelPrize.org, © The Nobel Foundation 2005. The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger. What a stunning achievement – or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune. In 1960 the British novelist C. P. Snow said on the front page of the New York Times that unless the nuclear powers drastically reduced their nuclear armaments thermonuclear warfare within the decade was a “mathematical certainty.” Nobody appeared to think Snow’s statement extravagant. We now have that mathematical certainty compounded more than four times, and no nuclear war. Can we make it through another half dozen decades? There has never been any doubt about the military effectiveness of nuclear weapons or their potential for terror. A large part of the credit for their not having been used must be due to the “taboo” that Secretary of State Dulles perceived to have attached itself to these weapons as early as 1953, a taboo that the Secretary deplored. The weapons remain under a curse, a now much heavier curse than the one that bothered Dulles in the early 1950s. These weapons are unique, and a large part of their uniqueness derives from their being perceived as unique. We call most of the others “conventional,” and that word has two distinct senses. One is “ordinary, familiar, traditional,” a word that can be applied to food, clothing, or housing. The more interesting sense of “conventional” is something that arises as if by compact, by agreement, by convention. It is simply an established convention that nuclear weapons are different. True, their fantastic scale of destruction dwarfs the conventional weapons. But as early as the end of the Eisenhower administration nuclear weapons could be made smaller in explosive yield than the largest conventional explosives. There were military planners to whom “little” nuclear weapons appeared untainted by the taboo that they thought ought properly to attach only to weapons of a size associated with Hiroshima, or Bikini. But by then nuclear weapons had become a breed apart; size was no excuse from the curse. This attitude, or convention, or tradition, that took root and grew over these past five decades, is an asset to be treasured. It is not guaranteed to survive; and some possessors or potential possessors of nuclear weapons may not share the convention. How to preserve this inhibition, what kinds of policies or activities may threaten it, how the inhibition may be broken or dissolved, and what institutional arrangements may support or weaken it, deserves serious attention. How the inhibition arose, whether it was inevitable, whether it was the result of careful design, whether luck was involved, and whether we should assess it as robust or vulnerable in the coming decades, is worth examining. Preserving this tradition, and if possible helping to extend it to other countries that may yet acquire nuclear weapons, is as important as extending the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, now being renegotiated after its first twenty-five years. The first occasion when these weapons might have been used was early in the Korean war. Americans and South Koreans had retreated to a perimeter around the southern coastal city of Pusan and appeared in danger of being unable either to hold out or to evacuate. The nuclear-weapons issue arose in public discussion in this country and in the British parliament. Clement Atlee flew to Washington to beseech President Truman not to use nuclear weapons in Korea. The visit and its purpose were both public and publicized. The House of Commons, considering itself to have been a partner in the enterprise that produced nuclear weapons, considered it legitimate that Britain have a voice in the American decision. The successful landing at Inchon mooted the question whether nuclear weapons might have been used if the situation in the Pusan perimeter had become desperate enough. But at least the question of nuclear use had come up, and the upshot was in the negative. There may be more than enough reasons to explain the non-use at that time in Korea. But I do not recall that an important consideration, for the U.S. government or the U.S. public, was apprehension of the consequences of demonstrating that nuclear weapons were “usable,” of preempting the possibility of cultivating a tradition of non-use. Nuclear weapons again went unused in the disaster brought by the entry of Chinese armies, and were still unused during the bloody war of attrition that accompanied the Panmunjom negotiations. Whether they would have been used, and where and how they might have been used, had the war ground on for many more months, and what the subsequent history would have been had they been used in North Korea or in China at that time is of course speculative. Whether the threat of nuclear weapons, presumably in China rather than on