If a rifle makes an appearance onstage in Act 1, observed Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, it will be fired before the end of Act 3. Which is, if you ask me, a pretty alarming thought in a world with nuclear weapons.

It is true that there has been no nuclear strike since the cataclysms in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps the very enormity of those attacks was enough to alter the calculus. Perhaps, as Steven Pinker has argued, a taboo has grown up, strengthened with each successive year of nonuse — a taboo apparent in the biblical language with which a potential attack is usually described (“armageddon,” “apocalypse,” “holocaust,” etc.)