10 - Conclusion: the prospects for the nuclear taboo

Summary

[Regarding the 2002 India–Pakistan crisis:] The whole world would condemn whoever [uses a nuclear weapon] and I think that is a sobering reality that both understand … It is not just another weapon in a toolbox of weapons. It crosses a line that the world does not want to see crossed in 2002. And the condemnation that would go against whichever country did it would be worldwide and it would be immediate …

Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2002

… we went through the Korean War, we went through the Vietnam War, we've gone through the war on terror and we've not used nuclear weapons. That ought to say something about the threshold with respect to nuclear weapons.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2003

The nuclear taboo has been a powerful force inhibiting US resort to use of nuclear weapons since World War II. No taboo existed in 1945, but from the Korean War, when an emerging taboo entered deliberations mostly as an instrumental consideration, to the 1991 Gulf War, when it had become more embedded and internalized, it has restrained use of nuclear weapons, both by appearing as a “constraint” to actors and by engendering more constitutive processes of stigmatization and categorization. Despite cases where nuclear weapons were perceived to have military utility, US leaders have ruled out their use for political and normative reasons. Ultimately, in delegitimizing nuclear weapons, the nuclear taboo has constrained the practice of “self-help” in the international system.