lowed that the United States could feasibly work with states of differing and even antithetic social systems as long as they shared the American interest in countering challenges to global stability. This has become the primary guiding doctrine in American foreign policy since that time. Once this official policy shift was made, nuclear weapons became exactly what they originally were symbols for deterrence. The only continuing reason any nations of the nuclear club still deploy nuclear weapons is to deter hostility from other nations. The depth and complexity of American security policy reaches far beyond the scope of this investigation, but hopefully the role of the atomic bomb in U.S. foreign affairs is somewhat more clear. Today, nuclear diplomacy is dead. The world has somehow adapted to weapons of mass destruction, and the diplomatic and military strategy of nuclear weapons is far from the minds of U.S. officials in the State Department. The world has moved on to a new age in international relations. Kissenger said in 1968, "There was now no single decisive index by which the influence of states can be measured." As much as we might like to indict the policies of nuclear diplomacy for all its self-indulgent insanity, we must bear in mind that it was somehow successful. Not that an atomic bomb fell onto a nation from Kennen to Kissenger, but also that should show the altruistic commitment by men of power to keep the unthinkable....
