By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

The first time that an atomic bomb was used as a weapon of war was on 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima. The last time it was used was three days later in Nagasaki. Human beings have a tendency to overanalyse and unnecessarily complicate interpretations of pivotal events.

The simplest explanation for why nuclear weapons have not been used again in the 80 years since 1945, despite the presence of tens of thousands of warheads in American and Soviet arsenals at peak numbers in the 1980s, is that they are essentially unusable.

Their spread to a total of nine countries today, and the spell they cast on the leaders and scientists of many other countries who are enchanted by the magic of the bomb, rests on several mutually reinforcing myths, the first of which is that they won the war for the Allies in the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War. Policymakers, analysts, and pundits have widely internalised the belief that Japan surrendered in 1945 because of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Robert Billard gave us an admirable overview in Brownstone Journal recently of how several contemporaneous US policymakers and senior military officers believed that the atomic bombings were of dubious military value in ending the war but were profoundly unethical. Nor, for that matter, did the Truman administration believe at the time that the two bombs were war-winning weapons.

Rather, their strategic impact was vastly underestimated and they were thought of merely as an incremental improvement on the existing weaponry of war. It was only subsequently that the military, political, and ethical enormity of the decision to use atomic/nuclear weapons gradually sank in.

The key question, nonetheless, is not what Americans believed but what motivated Japanese policymakers to surrender. An examination of US perceptions at the time is irrelevant to answering this question. What emerges from the alternative analytical framework strongly reinforces Billard's thesis that the bomb was not the decisive factor in Japan's decision to surrender. Hiroshima was bombed on 6 August, Nagasaki on the 9, and Moscow broke its neutrality pact to attack Japan on the 9.

Tokyo announced the surrender on 15 August. The evidence is surprisingly clear that the close chronology between the bombings and Japan's surrender was a coincidence.

By early August Japan's leaders knew that they had been defeated and the war was lost. The crucial question confronting them was to whom they should surrender, for that would determine who would be the occupying power in defeated Japan. For a variety of reasons, they were strongly motivated to surrender to the US rather than the Soviet Union.

This was analysed in detail by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, professor of modern Russian and Soviet history at the University of California Santa Barbara, in a 2007 article in The Asia-Pacific Journal.

In Japanese decision-makers' minds the decisive factor in their unconditional surrender was the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific war against the essentially undefended northern approaches and Japanese apprehensions that Stalin's Soviet Union would be the occupying power unless they surrendered to the United States first.

That fateful decision determined not just which foreign power occupied Japan but the entire geopolitical map of the post-war Pacific during and through to the end of the Cold War.

Five Nuclear Paradoxes

The triple crisis afflicting nuclear arms control and disarmament arises from non-compliance with obligations of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) - the cornerstone of the global nuclear order since 1970 - by some states engaged in undeclared nuclear activities and others that have failed to honour their disarmament obligations under Article 6 of the NPT; states that are not party to the NPT; and non-state actors seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

The nuclear peace has held thus far as much because of good luck as sound stewardship...