The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on Christmas Day 1991. That evening, U.S. President George H. W. Bush addressed the American people and assured them that the long nuclear nightmare of the Cold War had finally come to an end. “For over 40 years,” Bush said, “the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. This struggle shaped the lives of all Americans. It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction.”

That confrontation, the president declared, “is now...

Nuclear weapons, as Henry Kissinger often remarked during the Cold War, are weapons continually in search of a doctrine. The history of the evolution of nuclear strategy in the United States, as in the other nuclear powers, is a story of the ongoing attempt to find political meaning and military relevance in weapons so destructive that they defeat traditional notions about strategy and the use of force in international affairs. As early as 1946, the American strategic thinker Bernard Brodie wrote that nuclear weapons represented the “end of strategy,” since any attempt at strategic reasoning collapsed in the face of...

The end of the Cold War was supposed to mean many things: the spread of democracy, the reunification of Europe, an economic “peace dividend,” and maybe, with the competition between individual freedom and collectivist repression resolved, even the end of intellectual history. Most important, it was supposed to represent a final release from the nuclear nightmare. Today, some of that promise has been realized. Europe is whole, and the world goes about its business largely free from the fear of global nuclear war. And yet, the weapons and strategies of the Cold War remain: Americans who were young children when...

We know that the Cold War was a “war,” not least because its participants thought it was. But we may never know why it stayed “cold.” The inescapable logic of Mutual Assured Destruction remains the most obvious explanation for the “long peace” of the Cold War, as both sides buttressed their vows to retaliate under any circumstances with large and intentionally redundant nuclear inventories, robust (or so they hoped) systems of command and control, and intricate scenarios for numerous contingencies.¹ Each side also feigned a kind of cold-bloodedness about nuclear war meant as much to scare the other side as...

In October 2006, North Korea successfully tested a nuclear bomb. Nearly four years later, as the United States and South Korea mounted a major joint military exercise in July 2010 that included the massive American aircraft carrierGeorge Washington, North Korea thundered that such an “unpardonable” provocation would mean war. The North Korean regime is a bizarre, pseudo-Communist dynasty governed by the fanatically oppressive Kim family since World War II, and it routinely makes such threats against actions it finds offensive or insulting—which is almost everything.

This time, however, Pyongyang brandished a new addition to its military and rhetorical...

The subject of nuclear weapons breeds both apathy and dread at the same time. During the Cold War, most people did not want to think about the realities of the nuclear age, especially since there was nothing that the average American (or Soviet) could have done about nuclear arms. The nuclear standoff of the late twentieth century was unavoidable, the alchemic result of a collision between a technological discovery and an ideological conflict, and it could not be exited with any sense of safety until the Cold War itself was somehow settled.

Then as now, people cannot be blamed for...