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ABSTRACT
According to Nina Tannenwald, the nuclear taboo is a deeply held moral norm against the first use of nuclear weapons. If the nuclear taboo is violated by a country engaging in nuclear first use, how might the taboo be preserved and nuclear restraint restored? An analysis contrasting the logic of nuclear deterrence with the logic of the nuclear taboo offers reasons why the nuclear taboo cannot be preserved if the response to nuclear first use is nuclear reprisal. Instead, the preservation of the nuclear taboo would require a combination of diplomatic, economic, and conventional military responses. Nuclear reprisal might restore nuclear deterrence, but it would also validate the role of nuclear weapons in national or alliance security policy. Taboo enforcement cannot rely on the very behaviors the taboo prohibits.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the editors of the Nonproliferation Review and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks. Any remaining errors are solely the responsibility of the author.
Correction Statement
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10736700.2022.2080339).
Notes
1 Thomas C. Schelling, “An Astonishing Sixty Years: The Legacy of Hiroshima,” Nobel Prize Lecture, December 8, 2005, https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/schelling-lecture.pdf. For other authors concerned about the rising risks of nuclear aggression from new nuclear states, see Jeffrey Lewis, The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks against the United States: A Speculative Novel (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); S. Paul Kapur, “India and Pakistan’s Unstable Peace: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like Cold War Europe,” International Security, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2005), pp. 127–52; George H. Quester, Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 111–20; T.V. Paul, The Tradition of Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 124–42; Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino, “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran,” International Security, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2017), pp. 41–79. For a general account of future scenarios of limited nuclear conflict, see Thomas G. Mahnken, “Future Scenarios of Limited Nuclear Conflict,” in Jeffrey A. Larsen and Kerry M. Kartchner, eds., On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).
2 Nina Tannenwald, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Nonuse,” International Organization, Vol. 53, No. 3 (1999), pp. 433–68. See also T.V. Paul, “Nuclear Taboo and War Initiation in Regional Conflicts,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1995), pp. 696–717, for an earlier attempt at the taboo thesis.
3 Nina Tannenwald, “Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo,” International Security, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2005), pp. 14–27. The Dulles quote is found on p. 23. See also Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
4 The preservation of the nuclear taboo as a possible vital national interest was the focus of a workshop, “Response to North Korean Nuclear First Use Workshop,” convened by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). It was held on April 23–24, 2019 at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University. The first draft of this paper was presented at the workshop on April 23, and the current draft includes revisions based on the workshop’s discussions. Many thanks to James Scouras and the other APL coordinators for inviting me to participate, and thanks also to the workshop’s participants for their valuable input.
5 White House, Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races, January 3, 2022, <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/01/03/p5-statement-on-preventing-nuclear-war-and-avoiding-arms-races/#:~:text=We%20affirm%20that%20a%20nuclear,and%20must%20never%20be%20fought.&text=We%20underline%20our%20desire%20to,with>. For the 1985 Reagan–Gorbachev statement, see Joint Soviet–United States Statement on the Summit Meeting in Geneva, November 21, 1985, <https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/joint-soviet-united-states-statement-summit-meeting-geneva>.
6 Ken Booth and Nicholas J. Wheeler, The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation, and Trust in World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 149, 169–70; David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), pp. 91–97, 265–66.
7 William Walker, A Perpetual Menace: Nuclear Weapons and International Order (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 23–25.
8 Alexander George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 61. Many thanks to Joshua Pollack for bringing George and Smoke’s distinction to my attention.
9 Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, pp. 10–12; Nina Tannenwald, “How Strong Is the Nuclear Taboo Today?” Washington Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2018), p. 89.
10 The nature of the disarmament commitments expressed in NPT Article VI is a matter of controversy. Advocates of nuclear abolition maintain that Article VI requires nuclear disarmament and the good-faith negotiations that must lead to it. See, for example, Tadateru Konoe and Peter Maurer, “Remembering Hiroshima: Nuclear Disarmament Is a Humanitarian Imperative,” International Committee of the Red Cross, June 8, 2014, <https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/statement/2014/08-06-japan-hiroshima-atomic-bomb.htm>. Critics tend to argue that Article VI requires only good-faith negotiations on disarmament, and not the attainment of the goal of disarmament itself. See, for example, Christopher Ford, “Debating Disarmament: Interpreting Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2007), pp. 401–28. This paper’s analysis sides with the former position.
11 Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, pp. 8–9; Frank Sauer, Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Nonuse of U.S. Nuclear Weapons (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 29–33. For discussions of nuclear taboo as tradition, see Quester, Nuclear First Strike; Scott D. Sagan, “Realist Perspectives on Ethical Norms and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” in Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee, eds., Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 73–95; Schelling., “An Astonishing Sixty Years”; and a summary discussion in Rebecca Davis Gibbons and Keir Lieber, “How Durable Is the Nuclear Weapons Taboo?” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2019), pp. 29-54.
12 Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, pp. 51–52.
13 Tannenwald, pp. 12–13.
14 Nuclear-abolition advocates have attempted to effectively stigmatize nuclear possession, but so far have been frustrated by what they see as persistent de-stigmatization efforts by the nuclear possessors. See, for example, Ray Acheson, “Editorial: Ya Basta! It’s All About the Ban,” NPT News in Review, May 22, 2015, <https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/disarmament-fora/npt/2015/nir/10037-22-may-2015-vol-13-no-16 >; Rick Gladstone, “A Treaty Is Reached to Ban Nuclear Arms. Now Comes the Hard Part,” New York Times, July 7, 2017, <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/world/americas/united-nations-nuclear-weapons-prohibition-destruction-global-treaty.html >; Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, September 20, 2017. Also see Tom Sauer and Matthias Reveraert, “The Potential Stigmatizing Effect of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 25, Nos. 5–6 (2018), pp. 437–55.
15 For an early discussion of norm emergence, see Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 4 (1998), pp. 887–917. In their model, diffusion of an emerging norm may reach a tipping point, after which a norm cascade proceeds, leading to norm internalization. For chapters on norm dynamics and arms control, see Harald Müller and Carmen Wunderlich, eds., Norm Dynamics in Multilateral Arms Control: Interests, Conflict, and Justice (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013).
16 Thomas E. Doyle II, “Hiroshima and Two Paradoxes of Japanese Nuclear Perplexity,” Critical Military Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2015), pp. 160–73; Thomas E. Doyle II, The Ethics of Nuclear Weapons Dissemination: Moral Dilemmas of Aspiration, Avoidance, and Prevention (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 36.
17 Treaties establishing nuclear-weapon-free-zones have been reached for Latin America and the Caribbean (1967), the South Pacific (1985), Southeast Asia (1995), Africa (1996), and Central Asia (2006). See United Nations, Office for Disarmament Affairs, “Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones,” n.d., <https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/nwfz/>.
18 See, for example, Ramesh Thakur, Nuclear Weapons and International Security: Collected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2015); Lawrence S. Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). For a recent summary discussion, see Thomas E. Doyle II, Nuclear Ethics in the 21st Century: Survival, Order, and Justice (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), pp. 121–58.
19 For a tally, see, for example, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, “Signatures and Ratification Status,” n.d., <https://www.icanw.org/signature_and_ratification_status>.
20 Sauer, Atomic Anxiety, pp. 35–36. On the Biden administration’s consideration of adopting a no-first-use policy, see Amy F. Woolf, “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy: Considering ‘No First Use,’" Congressional Research Service, October 13, 2021, <https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/IN10553.pdf>.
21 Tannenwald, “How Strong Is the Nuclear Taboo Today?” On the justifications for opposing the TPNW, see Brad Roberts, “Ban the Bomb? Or Bomb the Ban? Next Steps on the Ban Treaty,” European Leadership Network, 2018, <https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/180322-Brad-Roberts-Ban-Treaty.pdf>; Heather Williams, “Why a Nuclear Weapons Ban Is Unethical (for Now): NATO and the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons Initiative,” RUSI Journal, Vol. 161, No. 2 (2016), pp. 38–47. For a justification of nuclear modernization in an increasingly changing threat environment, see Brad Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).
22 On the issue of precedents, see Gibbons and Lieber, “How Durable Is the Nuclear Weapons Taboo?” p. 33; Reid B.C. Pauly, “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button? Wargames and the Sources of Nuclear Restraint,” International Security, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2018), pp. 151–92. On the issue of reputational costs, see T.V. Paul, “Self-Deterrence: Nuclear Weapons and the Enduring Credibility Challenge,” International Journal, Vol. 71, No. 1 (2016), pp. 20–40. On the spiral of escalation emerging out of deterrence logic, see Quester, Nuclear First Strike; Sagan, “Realist Perspectives,” pp. 77–83.
23 Quester, Nuclear First Strike, p. 32.
24 Walker, A Perpetual Menace, pp. 16, 23–25, 82, 131.
25 Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, 291–92.
26 International-norms scholarship strongly suggests that norm violations per se do not lead to norm “death” and that it is not clear how many norm violations would have to occur to induce norm death. The main concern has to do with a society’s commitment to a norm’s legitimacy by various means of enforcement. See, for example, Aidan Hehir, Hollow Norms and the Responsibility to Protect (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 6.
27 Kenneth N. Waltz, “More May Be Better,” in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, eds., The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), pp. 3–45; Michael D. Cohen, “Fear and Loathing: When Nuclear Proliferation Emboldens,” Journal of Global Security Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2018), pp. 56–71.
28 See, for example, Neta C. Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Müller and Wunderlich, Norm Dynamics in Multilateral Arms Control; Brian C. Rathbun, Trust in International Cooperation: The Creation of International Security Institutions and the Domestic Politics of American Multilateralism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Maria Rost Rublee, Nonproliferation Norms: Why States Choose Nuclear Restraint (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009).
29 Lewis A. Dunn, “The NPT: Assessing the Past, Building the Future,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2009), pp. 143–72; Matthew Fuhrmann and Yonatan Lupu, “Do Arms Control Treaties Work? Assessing the Effectiveness of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3 (2016), pp. 530–39.
30 On the weakening of the nuclear taboo, see, for example, Gibbons and Lieber, “How Durable Is the Nuclear Weapons Taboo?”; Daryl G. Press, Scott D. Sagan, and Benjamin A. Valentino, “Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Nonuse of Nuclear Weapons,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 107, No. 1 (2013), pp. 188–206; George H. Quester, “The End of the Nuclear Taboo?” in Jeffrey A. Larsen and Kerry M. Kartchner, eds., On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Tannenwald, “How Strong Is the Nuclear Taboo Today?” On the relationship between norms of reciprocity, legitimacy, fairness, and equality, see Doyle, The Ethics of Nuclear Weapons Dissemination, pp. 41–47.
31 The idea for this assumption is based on research on recent work on face-to-face diplomacy. See Marcus Holmes, Face-to-Face Diplomacy: Social Neuroscience and International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Nicholas J. Wheeler, Trusting Enemies: Interpersonal Relationships in International Conflict (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018).
32 Sagan, “Realist Perspectives on Ethical Norms,” p. 74.
33 See, for example, Crawford, Argument and Change.
34 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 2015 [1977]), p. 13.
35 Some participants at the APL workshop cited in note 4 suggested that nuclear reprisal might preserve the nuclear taboo.
36 For several chapters on deterrence theory and recent developments in this theory, see T.V. Paul, Patrick M. Morgan, and James J. Wirtz, eds., Complex Deterrence: Strategy in the Global Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Sauer, Atomic Anxiety, especially pp. 8–24, for a critique of deterrence theory.
37 For several chapters on such nuclear-crisis management, as well as citations to other key works on the matter, see Larsen and Kartchner, On Limited Nuclear War.
38 See Cohen, “Fear and Loathing.”
39 For an extended discussion of the role of limited nuclear reprisal strikes in deterrence restoration, see Kerry M. Kartchner and Michael S. Gerson, “Escalation to Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century,” in Jeffrey A. Larsen and Kerry M. Kartchner, eds., On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), pp. 144–71. See also Quester, Nuclear First Strike, pp. 53–73.
40 Quester, Nuclear First Strike, pp. 9, 88–89. Schuyler Foerster, “Deterrence, Crisis Management, and War Termination,” in Jeffrey A. Larsen and Kerry M. Kartchner, eds., On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), pp. 197–204.
41 For an extended discussion, see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Consequentialism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/consequentialism>.
42 For applications of Hobbesian rationalism to questions of nuclear deterrence, see David Gauthier, “Deterrence, Maximization, and Rationality,” Ethics, Vol. 94, No. 3 (1984), pp. 474–95; Gregory S. Kavka, “Some Paradoxes of Deterrence,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 75, No. 6 (1978), pp. 285–302.
43 For an extended discussion of deontological international ethics, see Thomas E. Doyle II, “Deontological International Ethics,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), <https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.141>. For a discussion of nonconsequentialism as a virtue ethic, see Joseph S. Nye, Nuclear Ethics (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 14–26.
44 Quester, Nuclear First Strike, pp. 53–89.
45 I thank Nina Tannenwald for highlighting this issue for me. For a small sample of the discussion on belligerent reprisal, see Ian Brownlie, “Some Legal Aspects of the Use of Nuclear Weapons,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1965), pp. 437–51; Andrew D. Mitchell, “Does One Illegality Merit Another? The Law of Belligerent Reprisals in International Law,” Military Law Review, Vol. 170 (Winter 2001), pp. 155–77; Brian Orend, The Morality of War (Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press, 2013), pp. 130–54; Philip Sutter, “The Continuing Role for Belligerent Reprisals,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2008), pp. 93–122; Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 207–21.
46 Orend, The Morality of War, pp. 164–66.
47 Sutter, “The Continuing Role.”
48 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 207–21. Orend’s account disputes this claim. See Orend, The Morality of War, pp. 131–32.
49 Sutter, “The Continuing Role”; Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 208–15.
50 Brownlie, “Some Legal Aspects,” p. 445.
51 The term “exploded” mirrors Michael Walzer’s usage when describing nuclear weapons’ effects on just-war theory. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 282.
52 Mitchell, “Does One Illegality Merit Another?”
53 On the subject of nuclear-targeting policy and the noncombatant-immunity principle, see Jeffrey G. Lewis and Scott D. Sagan, “The Nuclear Necessity Principle: Making U.S. Targeting Policy Conform to Ethics & the Law of War,” Daedalus, Vol. 145, No. 4 (2016), pp. 64–72.
54 In addition to the previously cited sources, see Orend, The Morality of War, pp. 131–32.
55 Walker, A Perpetual Menace, pp. 23–25.
56 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 250–67.
57 Walzer, pp. 250–54. See also Orend, The Morality of War, pp. 153–82; Henry Shue, “Liberalism: The Impossibility of Justifying Weapons of Mass Destruction,” in Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee, eds., Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 145–54.
58 Orend, The Morality of War, pp. 111–52; Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 154–57.
59 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 274.
60 Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 37. Quoted in Orend, The Morality of War, p. 166.
61 Orend, The Morality of War, p. 166.
62 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, especially chapter 4.
63 Orend, The Morality of War, pp. 162–64.
64 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 281–82.
65 For instance, the American people generally do not embrace the nuclear taboo. See Alida R. Haworth, Scott D. Sagan, and Benjamin A. Valentino, “What Do Americans Really Think about Conflict with North Korea? The Answer Is Both Reassuring and Disturbing,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 24, 2019, pp. 179–86, <https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1629576>; Press et al., “Atomic Version”; Sagan and Valentino, “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran.”
66 Many participants in the 2019 APL workshop cited in note 4 also voiced this opinion.
67 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 282.
68 Pauly, “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button?” pp. 163–64; Sagan, “Realist Perspectives on Ethical Norms,” p. 83.
69 Sagan, “Realist Perspectives on Ethical Norms,” pp. 81–83.
70 Benjamin Buch and Scott D. Sagan, “Our Red Lines and Theirs: New Information Reveals Why Saddam Hussein Never Used Chemical Weapons in the Gulf War,” Foreign Policy, December 13, 2013, <https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/13/our-red-lines-and-theirs>.
71 Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, pp. 342–68.
72 Sagan, “Realist Perspectives on Ethical Norms,” pp. 82–83.
73 Sagan, p. 83.
74 Sagan, p. 83.
75 Paul, “Self-Deterrence: Nuclear Weapons and the Enduring Credibility Challenge,” p. 25.
76 Paul, pp. 29–39.
77 Paul, pp. 30–33.
78 Paul, p. 34.
79 International Court of Justice, “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion,” in Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Philippe Sands, eds., International Law, the International Court of Justice, and Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 520–60.
80 Daniel Bodansky, “Non Liquet and the Incompleteness of International Law,” in Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Philippe Sands, eds., International Law, the International Court of Justice, and Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 153.
81 Bodansky, p. 154.
82 See, for example, David P. Barash, “Nuclear Deterrence Is a Myth: And a Lethal One at That,” The Guardian, January 14, 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/14/nuclear-deterrence-myth-lethal-david-barash>; Seth Baum, “Breaking Down the Risk of Nuclear Deterrence Failure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 27, 2015, <https://thebulletin.org/2015/07/breaking-down-the-risk-of-nuclear-deterrence-failure/>; Todd Gitlin, “Time to Move Beyond Deterrence,” The Nation, December 22, 1984, <https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Time+to+move+beyond+deterrence.-a03569090>; Benoît Pelopidas, “A Bet Portrayed as a Certainty: Reassessing the Added Deterrent Value of Nuclear Weapons,” in George P. Shultz and James E. Goodby, eds., The War that Must Never Be Fought: Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2015), pp. 5–56; Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Thakur, Nuclear Weapons and International Security; Desmond Tutu, “Imagine a World without Nuclear Weapons,” CNN, February 13, 2014, <https://www.cnn.com/2014/02/13/opinion/nuclear-weapons-desmond-tutu/index.html>.
83 Sauer, Atomic Anxiety, pp. 8–23. See also Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Hoffman, The Dead Hand; Alexander Ward, “Trump Doesn’t Have a “Nuclear Button” on His Desk. He Could Easily Attack North Korea Anyway,” Vox, January 9, 2018, <https://www.vox.com/world/2018/1/3/16844772/trump-north-korea-button-nuclear-taunt>.
84 Sauer, Atomic Anxiety, p. 25, emphasis in original.
85 Walker, A Perpetual Menace, pp. 16, 198 n. 34.
86 Herman Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable in the 1980s (New York: Touchstone, 1985).
87 Lawrence M. Hinman, Contemporary Moral Issues: Diversity and Consensus (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 129–65.
88 Gibbons and Lieber, “How Durable Is the Nuclear Weapons Taboo?” p. 30.
89 Booth and Wheeler, The Security Dilemma, pp. 83–170; Rathbun, Trust in International Cooperation.
90 Sagan, “Realist Perspectives on Ethical Norms,” p. 76.
91 Booth and Wheeler, The Security Dilemma, pp. 102–4. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977).