ABSTRACT
On reading the New York Times’ report on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, America’s leading scholar of naval strategy, Bernard Brodie, is reported to have lamented, ‘everything that I have written is obsolete’ (Kaplan, 1983: 10). Today, it is difficult to recapture the shock, bafflement and sense of the vastness of the strategic challenge felt by strategists in 1945 when confronted for the first time with the demonstrated fact of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons can be bracketed with air power, space power and now cyber-power as comprising a clutch of wholly new means of warfare. Each has required its users to understand what it can and cannot do. It is unprecedented in strategic history for a century to produce four essentially technological revolutions in military affairs. But the nuclear revolution was distinctive, in good part for reason of the unprecedented menace that it brought to international relations. Air power, space power and cyber-power all arrived over a period of years, though the pace of air power’s development was accelerated by the Great War of 1914-18. That slow arrival meant that each was subject to much speculation and debate prior to its being accorded major importance in strategic affairs. Not so the nuclear weapon.
