Since the dawn of the nuclear era, men and women everywhere have wished that the terrible engine of destruction represented by the device exploded in the New Mexico desert in July 1945 had never existed. In more recent years many thousands of persons in tens of countries have taken to the streets to rage against the possession of nuclear weaponsin particular, their possession by the two superpowers. However, neither rage nor grief nor mass action can rid the world of nuclear weapons. The know-how required to build them will ever remain with mankind; because that knowledge cannot be eradicated, neither we nor our heirs will ever be entirely free of fear of the blast, the firestorm, and the lethal radioactivity that lurk beneath the mushroom cloud.' Yet if the nuclear genie cannot be put back into the bottle, it may still be possible largely to eliminate the threat of the use of nuclear weapons as a dominating factor in international politics. That would be the case if it came to be generally perceived that nuclear weapons were retained in national arsenals solely to deter their use by other nations. Such a perception cannot be induced simply by means of declarations or injunctions -although how governments talk about nuclear weapons is clearly of enormous importance. It might be brought about through a combination of changes in declaratory postures and careful "engineering" of the nuclear forces of the United States and the Soviet Union, the only countries currently with nuclear forces large and diverse enough to make them obviously suitable for "war fighting" as well as for deterrence. That perception would be a very long step toward the denuclearization of international politics. It will not easily be achieved, however, for such a perception would connote a radical departure from the one on which the governments of both superpowers have grown used to relying for the past several decades. With varying assiduity at various moments, both have fostered a perception