Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has eroded the nuclear taboo

In 1999 nina tannenwald, a political scientist at Brown University, wrote a paper analysing something she had observed among generals, politicians and strategists: the “nuclear taboo”. This was not, she argued, simply a matter of general queasiness or personal moral qualms; it had important consequences. The lack of nuclear wars in the years since America’s destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she argued, was not simply a matter of deterrence. It had also relied on a growing sense of the innate wrongness of nuclear weapons putting their use beyond the pale.

Threats of nuclear attack like those made in the 1940s and 1950s had become vanishingly rare. As the taboo had strengthened, seeking to acquire nuclear weapons had come to be seen as the mark of a barbarian. Avoiding any explicit mention of actually using the ones you already had was the mark of a gentleman. If there was a certain hypocrisy about all this—which there was—it was one that exemplified the French aphorist La Rochefoucauld’s definition of the term: the tribute that vice pays to virtue.