The 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has understandably garnered reflection and more than a little debate. Much of the looking back has under-estimated the case for the American use of nuclear weapons (to avoid what would have been a prolonged and costly invasion of Japan to end the second world war) and overlooked the subsequent utility of nuclear weapons in helping to keep the cold war cold.
Less commented on, though, is a question not of history but of the future: is the world likely to go another 70 years without nuclear weapons being used? The short and troubling answer is no. Even worse, the potential for such
use has increased in recent years and seems likely to rise further. The potential for use is least among those that maintain the largest inventories of nuclear weapons and have possessed them the longest. The chance of the five formal nuclear weapon states — the US, Russia, China, Britain and France — deliberately using such weapons is minuscule.