Thomas Schelling's Nobel Prize Speech: An Astonishing Sixty Years: The Legacy of Hiroshima

Per an essay on LessWrong about Thomas Schelling's Nobel lecture, the game theorist makes a striking observation: for sixty years, no nation has detonated a nuclear weapon in warfare. Since nineteen forty-five, the world has avoided nuclear conflict—not through military weakness, but through what Schelling calls a 'taboo': an almost unspoken convention treating nuclear weapons as fundamentally different from conventional arms. That boundary was never inevitable. In the nineteen-fifties, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explicitly tried to break it, arguing nuclear weapons should be treated as conventional tools. Yet the taboo held. Schelling examines near-misses—the Korean War, Taiwan crises—where nuclear weapons might have been deployed but were withheld. He concludes this fragile social convention is as crucial to stability as any arms treaty. His warning: conventions can break, and the next six decades are not guaranteed.

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