ABSTRACT
The nuclear revolution has distinct, emergent features. The invention of nuclear weapons is one of the unique thresholds in human history at which a distinctly new causal factor emerges, whose actual and symbolic consequences transcend its original historical context. For the scientists, nuclear pacifism was the only possible realism of the nuclear age. The historical narrative presented so far assumes that Hobbesian realism has become inadequate and obsolete in the nuclear age. The adequacy of realism and its associated modes of thinking is called into question in the nuclear age. Realism begins with the thesis that substantial differences exist between domestic politics and international politics; the former is about authority, and the latter is about power relations. Indeed, realism as a theory of international relations has been under attack on normative-philosophical grounds by a number of political theorists. Contemporary nuclear weapons systems have unique features whose strategic and moral significance is irreducible to the physical properties of a single A-bomb.
