During the 2016 US presidential campaign Hillary Clinton famously taunted her rival with the words ‘a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons’. Since Donald Trump became president the nuclear issue has only grown in prominence.nce.
Nine countries possess nuclear weapons (see Table 1), though they have only been used twice, by the USA in 1945. The two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 250,000 people, and forced Japan’s surrender from the Second World War. They also ushered in a new type of warfare, the Cold War (1945–91), in which the superpowers avoided direct military confrontation for fear of risking nuclear war. Both sides recognised that nuclear weapons were too devastating to use, even as they raced to develop arsenals that could deliver mutually assured destruction (MAD) in the event of war.
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