Russia and Belarus held joint nuclear drills earlier this week, raising alarms as Vladimir Putin continues to issue thinly veiled threats of nuclear strikes against Ukraine. |
The exercises, in which the two countries practiced deploying tactical nuclear weapons, came after Russia deployed nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles to Belarus last year. In 2024, Moscow updated its nuclear doctrine to place Belarus under its nuclear umbrella and to introduce more ambiguity about the circumstances that might prompt Russia to use nuclear weapons. |
Putin has invoked nuclear rhetoric numerous times since he ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but he is not the only leader of a nuclear-armed state flirting with the use of these weapons. In remarks to reporters earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump said that if the fragile ceasefire with Tehran were to collapse, “you’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran.” His comment was widely interpreted as an allusion to a nuclear attack. |
That the leaders of the two states with the largest nuclear arsenals would be so cavalier about the prospect of nuclear war is a troubling indication that the “nuclear taboo” is not as strong as it was in the decades after World War II. It’s worth considering how that taboo emerged in the first place: It was only due to the work of intrepid journalists who insisted on documenting the facts despite the U.S. government’s efforts to cover up the fallout of its decision to use nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. |
A new PBS documentary, “Bombshell,” recounts how the Truman administration sought to censor all firsthand accounts from the only two cities to directly experience a nuclear blast. U.S. officials and military officers went to great lengths to avoid comparisons with chemical weapons, the use of which during World War I had been widely condemned and prohibited by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. They published memos and planted stories with friendly reporters—such as William Laurence of The New York Times—to downplay accounts of fatal radiation poisoning among Japanese civilians. Leslie Groves, the general who directed the Manhattan Project, infamously testified before the Senate that radiation sickness was “a very pleasant way to die.” |
“Bombshell” contrasts Laurence, who was willing to implicate himself in a false narrative for the sake of maintaining high-level access, with other reporters like John Hersey, Charles Loeb, and Leslie Nakashima, who published testimonials that cast doubt on Washington’s propaganda. It was because of that group of principled journalists that the full scope of the horror of nuclear weapons came to be widely understood. |
More than 80 years later, the leaders of the U.S. and Russia are once again rattling their nuclear sabers, and Cold War-era treaties restricting the two largest nuclear arsenals have expired. At the same time, there are some bright spots: Public opinion polls and surveys of U.S. military officers continue to demonstrate widespread resistance to the use of nuclear weapons. But as WPR’s Paul Poast put it last year, “the nuclear taboo can’t be taken for granted.” |