ABSTRACT
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was proposed to the world at the end of the 1960s, Italian diplomats criticized it as "the first unequal treaty of the twentieth century," and Indian diplomats attacked it as a violation of nations' sovereign prerogatives. The period that should have been ripe for discussions of preventive war was thus the time of the American nuclear monopoly, from 1945 to 1949, before the detonation of Josef Stalin's first atomic bomb was detected to the surprise and consternation of the Truman administration The move to produce thermonuclear weapons gets more often condemned for having been unnecessary, for having needlessly raised the world's physical peril. Nuclear weapons more generally have not been used again in anger since 1949, with more than sixty years passing in a pattern of what is seen as mutual deterrence, or mutual assured destruction.
