The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 80 years ago this month is something to commemorate but not celebrate. It was also the beginning of a new era: the Atomic Age. Growing up in the latter stages of the Cold War, my generation didn’t live with the sense of menace and the Bert the Turtle duck-and-cover drills baby boomers endured. But both cohorts were blessed by the absence of a large-scale war, conventional or nuclear, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Which brings up an 80-year-old question: Did the development of atomic weapons keep the peace during the Cold War? And if so, what accounts for this paradoxical result? The simple answer is the unsatisfying one: It’s complicated.
Harry Truman, the president responsible for Hiroshima, insisted that the bomb would "become a powerful and forceful influence toward the maintenance of world peace.” Recent polling by Pew suggests that view is out of fashion: 69% of U.S. respondents said the development of nukes "has made the world less safe.”
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