Since the first atomic explosion, the uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear weapons has been the scenario American statesmen most feared. Game-theoreticians laboring in the basement of the Pentagon have discerned what would result from it again and again; they have stamped report after report with the same conclusion: God forbid.
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945—when a ball of fire rose in gold, violet, grey, and blue over the Jornada del Muerto desert, melting the sand into light green radioactive glass and illuminating every peak and crevasse of the nearby mountain range with a searing white light—American statesmen began a frantic, desperate effort to forestall the emergence of precisely the world we are now ushering into being.
“[T]he US is basically making the case to all states that they should try as hard as they can to develop nuclear weapons,” writes the war historian Phillips O’Brien:
The lessons of the last few days should be obvious even to those who have been the strongest ad…
