Theolegal Nuclear Weapons Policy

Abstract

The development, use, spread, and defense against nuclear weapons pose unusually devastating moral challenges for humanity and the American polity specifically. Nuclear weapons create the possibility of instantaneous, push-button destruction on a scale that would otherwise require enormous logistical resources over substantial time—a scale so large that the most likely scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons imply at least tens of thousands of civilian casualties. This awesome capacity was offered to President Franklin D. Roosevelt by Albert Einstein and other leading scientific minds out of the grim realization that it might otherwise fall into the hands of Nazi Germany, and it was used by President Harry Truman to bring the war with Japan to an immediate conclusion. The immediacies of the development and use of nuclear weapons weighed against the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shape an emotionally charged debate across a large and growing number of dimensions of nuclear weapons policy. Reverend Francis X. Winters asks in a 2009 book, Remembering Hiroshima: Was it Just?¹ Why does the United States retain nuclear weapons today? Is nuclear deterrence stable in the evolving world order? What should the role of nuclear weapons be? Under what circumstances would the United States use nuclear weapons? How many nuclear weapons should the United States have? How quickly and flexibly should U.S. nuclear weapons be kept ready for use? Is effective nuclear nonproliferation possible? Is nuclear disarma- ment desirable and achievable?