14
HANNAH ARENDT
fact and despite occasional flare-ups, this whole period was much
rather a time of cold and uneasy peace, and the reason why I insist
on this is not that I am interested in semantics, but that I feel we
should not cry wolf too soon.
In other words, what I am afraid of is that a cold war as a real
substitute for a hot war may break out one day because it might con–
stitute the only alternative in our present situation, in which we must
avoid the threat of total annihilation without knowing how to exclude
war as such from the realm of foreign politics. The recent and, let
up hope, temporary resumption of nuclear tests has shown how a cold
war actually might be conducted. For these tests, unlike those that
preceded them, were no longer conducted for the mere sake of the
perfection of certain armaments. The tests themselves were meant as
an instrument of policy, and they were immediately understood as
such. They gave the rather ominous impression of some sort of tenta–
tive warfare in which two opposing camps demonstrate to each other
the destructiveness of the weapons in their possession. And while it
is always possible that this deadly game of ifs and whens may suddenly
turn into the real thing, it is not inconceivable that one day a hypo–
thetical victory and a hypothetical defeat could end a war that never
exploded into reality.
Is this sheer fantasy? I think not. We were confronted, potentially
at least, with this sort of thing at the end of the Second World War,
at the very moment when the atomic bomb made its first appearance.
At that time, it was considered whether a demonstration of the potency
of the new weapon on a deserted island might not be enough to
force the Japanese into unconditional surrender. The advantages of
this alternative have been argued many times on moral grounds, and
I think rightly so. The decisive political argument in its favor was
that it would have been much more in line with our actual and
professed war aims; surely, what we wished to achieve was un–
conditional surrender, not extermination or wholesale slaughter of
the civilian population.
Hypothetical warfare, it must be admitted, rests on at least two
assumptions, both of which are actualities in the relationships be–
tween those fully developed powers which could enter into a nuclear
war at all. It presupposes, first, a stage of technical development
where risks can be calculated with almost perfect precision so that
