The Frisch-Peierls memorandum was submitted to the British government as a warning. Prime Minister Winston Churchill heeded the message, establishing the Maud committee a month later to investigate the military potential of atomic energy.

It reported in secret in July 1941, urging production of a bomb and Britain's cooperation with the US in this endeavour. In a now-famous line, the committee said :“No nation would care to risk being caught without a weapon of such decisive possibilities.”

The demonstration of what the atomic bomb was capable of at Hiroshima, and then at Nagasaki, spurred others to follow the committee's logic. The Soviet Union, fearing a US atomic monopoly, tested its first bomb in 1949. Britain joined the nuclear club in 1952, followed by France in 1960 and China in 1964.

It is widely accepted that Israel had developed nuclear capability by the early 1970s, though it has maintained a position of ambiguity. India and Pakistan became declared nuclear powers in 1998 and North Korea followed in 2006.

While factors such as national ambition and status played a role in proliferation, a key driving force was fear, fear of adversaries achieving a lasting strategic advantage and, in the case of North Korea, an external attack.

Fear's centrality to the nuclear story is not only in relation to its role as a driver of proliferation. Nuclear fear has also been a key source of restraint. The most dramatic manifestation of this was the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

As I have argued elsewhere , shared fear of nuclear catastrophe led the then US president, John F Kennedy, and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev to develop empathy and trust. This was a key factor in the peaceful resolution of the crisis.

However, nuclear fear – and the deterrence it makes possible – is a fragile basis on which to safeguard humanity's future.

The world may have avoided the use of nuclear weapons since August 1945 through a combination of prudent statecraft and good luck. But how long is it before some combination of bad luck and reckless risk-taking leads to the use of nuclear weapons once again?

Russian nuclear sabre-rattling over Ukraine and the May 2025 conflict between India and Pakistan , unleashing military force between two nuclear-armed states, are warnings that the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons still hangs over humanity.

In the Cold War's climate of deep distrust and nuclear fear, the US and the Soviet Union at least had some shared guardrails and channels of communication. Arms control agreements agreed after the Cuban missile crisis limited superpower competition through the 1960s and 1970s. They continued to restrain US-Soviet competition in the early 1980s.

Nowadays, however, arms control has all but collapsed while reliable and trusted channels of communication between major nuclear adversaries are virtually non-existent. The prospects for regulating the nuclear arms competition between Russia, the US and China are bleak.

To mark the 80th anniversary of the advent of the nuclear epoch, the Nobel Laureate Assembly – a gathering of Nobel laureates and nuclear experts at the University of Chicago – warned in its 2025 Declaration for the Prevention of Nuclear War that:“Ultimately, security cannot be built on fear.”

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If the bomb was born out of fear, then ensuring it is never used again requires replacing fear with trust. Ten years into the nuclear epoch, Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell issued a manifesto signed by 11 signatories. It was created principally as a trust-building project between the East and the West.

The manifesto concluded :“We appeal as human beings to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

We now face the same choice the manifesto laid bare. One path leads to annihilation, the other to survival through a recognition of our common humanity.

Japan gives expression to that common humanity every August when Hiroshima and Nagasaki hold their peace memorial ceremonies. Remembering the victims and those who continue to suffer from the effects of the atomic bombings, these memorials look to a future where nuclear weapons no longer exist.

The nuclear bomb may have been born in fear. But only the building of trust, which may spring from that fear, can ensure it is never used again.

Nicholas John Wheeler is professor of international relations, Department of Political Science and International Studies and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at BASIC, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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