To put this another way: the most efficient way we could have possibly found to get the use of nuclear arms in war globally banned, was to have someone use one. The Cold War would have been far riskier if the world hadn’t seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it would have been a stand-off to the use of weapons we would have as-yet had no understanding of the consequences of using. It probably would have ended with the use of hundreds of bombs, rather than just two.
It’s sort of the moral equivalent of a “work to rule” strike: the best way to get through the lesson that something is bad, is to stop pushing back against it and just let it happen for once.
