At the dawn of what came to be dubbed our "nuclear era," strategist Bernard Brodie, in a book dramatically titled The Absolute Weapon, laid out two facts about the new bomb: "It exists" and "its destructive power is fantastically great." Brodie certainly got his facts right. But his implication -- that the bomb would prove to be fantastically important -- has scarcely been borne out over the ensuing decades.
In fact, the bomb's impact on substantive historical developments has been minimal: Things would likely have turned out much the same if it had never been developed. The only real effect of nuclear weapons is humanity's unhealthy obsession with them, a preoccupation that has inspired some seriously bad policy decisions. With a declarative certainty he never would have used in discussing physics, Albert Einstein once proclaimed that nuclear weapons "have changed everything except our way of thinking." But instead it seems that the weapons actually changed little except our way of thinking -- as well as of declaiming, gesticulating, deploying military forces, and spending lots of money.
