Morality and the Atom Bomb
by Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
June 18, 2025
The war between Israel and Iran, which overlaps with the war between Russia and Ukraine, makes the international scenario increasingly alarming. Let us leave aside the historical, political, and economic context in which these wars arose and developed and dwell on the moral problem on the horizon. In the Cold War era, the balance between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, was ensured by the strategy of “deterrence,” or “mutual assured destruction” (MAD), according to which nuclear weapons, due to their destructive potential, constituted a tool to deter the enemy from an attack that would have a devastating response. Nuclear arsenals had as their sole purpose “to nullify nuclear weapons” (Herman Kahn, Philosophy of Atomic Warfare, tr. it., Il Borghese, Milan 1966, p. 138). In the post-modern era following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there are no longer any shared international rules. The use of nuclear weapons is evoked, for example, by Vladimir Putin, as a means to rebalance military inferiority in the field of conventional weapons or, in the case of Iran, as a strategic goal to be achieved to destroy the State of Israel. One of the rules of deterrence was not to take the name of the bomb in vain. The verbal escalation we are witnessing could lead to actual war more quickly than we can imagine.
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