To play devil’s advocate, I don’t see why preventive war would be “insane”. If you’re the first nuclear power, and you can prevent your potential rivals from acquiring their own nukes, then that makes you an unassailable hegemon. With the benefit of hindsight, a clever arguer (not meant as a compliment) could even claim that this strategy isn’t evil but actually morally required because, if it indeed prevents others from obtaining nukes, then this prevents an entire source of future x-risk from MAD and the Cold War. Not to mention unpreventable human rights abuses by future nuclear powers like North Korea.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for this alternate history; most importantly from a strategic perspective, it’s not at all clear that the US could’ve kept the technology for itself no matter how aggressive it acted. Also it would’ve been evil, and I can’t imagine there would’ve been enough political will by the US public post-1945 to pursue such a war directly after World War II, so it would’ve eventually failed for that reason anyway.
To play devil’s advocate, I don’t see why preventive war would be “insane”. If you’re the first nuclear power, and you can prevent your potential rivals from acquiring their own nukes, then that makes you an unassailable hegemon. With the benefit of hindsight, a clever arguer (not meant as a compliment) could even claim that this strategy isn’t evil but actually morally required because, if it indeed prevents others from obtaining nukes, then this prevents an entire source of future x-risk from MAD and the Cold War. Not to mention unpreventable human rights abuses by future nuclear powers like North Korea.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for this alternate history; most importantly from a strategic perspective, it’s not at all clear that the US could’ve kept the technology for itself no matter how aggressive it acted. Also it would’ve been evil, and I can’t imagine there would’ve been enough political will by the US public post-1945 to pursue such a war directly after World War II, so it would’ve eventually failed for that reason anyway.
I appreciate the argument. I won’t get into it here, except to say that I wish we had John von Neumann participating in this conversation.
my understanding is that most thought preventing all nuclear proliferation would be impossible, and pretty early on.