Imagine, you are a tadpole, tasked, sometime in the middle of World War II, with designing the world of 1945. You don’t know if you will be an American soldier headed towards Okinawa, a Japanese civilian in Kokura, or a Soviet spy infiltrating Los Alamos. Your job is to set policy that leads to the most humane outcome – no matter who you turn out to be.

This is the spirit of philosopher John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance”, a way to weigh impossible decisions in a way that forces the decision-maker to arrive at the most fair and just outcome.

From that perspective, Harry Truman’s choice to drop the bombs on Japan was brutal, but arguably justified.

Historians still debate whether Japan would have surrendered. Some intercepted messages hinted at negotiation, but Japan seemed poised to fight on fiercely, with projected invasion likely to cause millions of deaths on both sides.

Moving forward with an invasion was something every American politician would be trying to avoid, given that it meant putting together the horrors of the invasion in Normandy in 1944 and the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Amid today’s conflicts, the 1945 decision offers a point of reference on nuclear warfare. While in the present, global nuclear powers are involved in conflicts around the world, today’s conditions make nuclear war far less likely and more unethical.

Back then, the choice was binary: invade or drop the bomb. Today, nations have a greater variety of means – proxies, cyber warfare, economic disruption etc. – to project force without resorting to nuclear weapons.

While the threshold for conflict is lower, the consequences of a nuclear strike are far greater. The world has seen, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the unparalleled scale of suffering such weapons cause. Today, such an attack would likely draw in every major power, with catastrophic loss of life.

Some see nuclear proliferation as proof war was inevitable. But in simple game theory, rational states avoid mutually assured destruction. A full scale US-China or NATO-Russia conflict, even incited from different states like Israel or Iran, would be catastrophic for all involved, creating strong incentives to avoid escalation.

In today’s rigid world order, a nuclear strike would only make sense if the material gains outweighed the catastrophic costs, an unlikely calculation. In 1945, the bomb carried strategic weight. In 2025, using one would be brash and brutish.

The ethical equation has shifted. Nuclear weapons today are more about preventing war than winning one. Barring an incredibly illogical and reckless chain of events, we are unlikely to see a catastrophic nuclear war anytime soon.