ABSTRACT
Nuclear weapons inspire a natural horror; yet their influence on world affairs, over the past half-century, was not entirely evil. The two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 saved far more lives (mainly Japanese lives) than they took. They forced Japan’s ruling militarists to abandon their plans to make the country fight to its last woman and child against the coming allied invasion – which had been seen as the only means of ending the 1939-45 war and liberating all the Japanese-occupied lands. And in the subsequent decades, at several critical moments, the fear of nuclear devastation helped to prevent tense east-west confrontations from exploding into full-scale war.
