Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

by Olivia Lau, Harvard Department of Government March 9, 2006

For most of the world, August 6, 2005 passed without much notice. For Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Economics, the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was remarkable for its very unremarkableness. On March 2, 2006 , in a talk sponsored by the IQSS Political Economy Workshop and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Thomas Schelling spoke on "The Legacy of Hiroshima" to a rapt audience of Harvard faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Recounting the construction of an attitude that many in his audience took for granted, Schelling described the construction of a nearly universal taboo against the use of nuclear weapons in war. Drawing on concepts popularized in his landmark work The Strategy of Conflict (1960), Schelling described the development of a tacit, shared understanding between adversaries that nuclear weapons were different, and not to be used in anger under any circumstances.

In a talk punctuated by personal reminisces from half a life spent fearing nuclear annihilation, Schelling pointed out that it had never been certain that the atomic powers would not use the bomb. Nuclear weapons could have been used at several points. President Truman, who had earlier authorized the use of atomic bombs against Japan, considered the use of nuclear weapons during the darkest moments of the Korean War. President Eisenhower reportedly considered using nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan during the Quemoy crisis. Admiral Radford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1954, had in mind, in Schelling's words, "not only the local value in Indochina, but the use of Dien Bien Phu in 'making the use of atomic bombs internationally acceptable.'" But atomic bombs were not used in Korea, Taiwan, Indochina, or at any point after 1945, and both the fear of the bomb and the convention against their use was reinforced by those decisions.

Schelling points out that the abhorrence against the atomic bomb was so deep, especially among military planners, that the Soviet Union would rather suffer "a costly and humiliating defeat in that primitive country," Afghanistan, than break the "nuclear inhibition." While running a war simulation at the National War College, Schelling offered his seminar a possible scenario from the First Gulf War: With Kuwait overrun, Iraqis in the Saudi oil fields, and American troops massing to repel the invasion, Iraq launches five nuclear weapons on the staging area, killing thousands of American troops. After an hour of discussion, he recounted that the entire seminar agreed that nuclear weapons should not be used in retaliation, but that the war should be "won the hard way," using only conventional forces. "Arms control is so often identified with limitations on the possession or deployment of weapons," Shelling remarked, "that it is often overlooked that is reciprocated investment in non-nuclear capability was a remarkable instance of unacknowledged but reciprocated arms control."

Schelling concluded by looking to the future of arms control. The biggest danger to this tacit convention against the use of nuclear weapons was not the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear powers, nor the possession of nuclear weapons by pariah states such as Iran and North Korea, nor the potential acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorists, but American civilian leaders. "The most critical question about nuclear weapons for the United States Government is whether the widespread taboo against nuclear weapons . . . is in our favor or against us. If it is in the American interest, as I believe obvious, advertising a continued dependence on nuclear weapons . . . has to be weighed against the corrosive effect on a nearly universal attitude that has been cultivated through universal abstinence of sixty years."

The unconventional nature of nuclear weapons has become a convention in the post-Hiroshima world, and has prevented their use in situations where military strategy might have conceivably justified their use. This tacit understanding--remarkable because it has kept the world whole for the past sixty years and unremarkable because it completely pervades contemporary thinking--demonstrates the power of focal points to coordinate behavior among adversarial actors, and the enduring power of Thomas Schelling's contribution to social science.