| Summary/Abstract |
Since August 1945, when the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in the closing days of WWII, no nation has employed nuclear weapons during war. Many people at the time fully expected that nuclear weapons would be used again after 1945. Yet, neither Presidents Harry Truman nor Dwight Eisenhower used nuclear weapons in the Korean War; Eisenhower refused requests to use nuclear weapons to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954; and President John F. Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev engaged in secret diplomacy to avoid a nuclear catastrophe during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
|