Good essay. I was in a strange position reading Jacobsen's book: I believe I may know, through quixotic reading and obsession, more about nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare than all people who do not either (a) have a Top Secret security clearance, and/or (b) study nuclear war professionally. What bothered me most in the book is that the illustrative scenario she has chosen is ludicrously unlikely. I would never place bets on what the first military use of nuclear weapons after Nagasaki will be (seems unvirtuous to do so), but a "bolt from the blue" attack like the one Jacobsen describes is absolutely not it. Vastly more likely is an escalatory dynamic where one power uses one or several tactical nuclear weapon to regain military momentum they are losing and to send a message of resolve to its opponents - think China striking a US aircraft carrier group if their invasion of Taiwan was bogging down. That would be an immensely dangerous and frightening scenario; I would confidently predict the mother of all one day stock market and economic crashes as panic overwhelmed people. That more realistic scenario is much more worth exploring, but it doesn't lead to what you correctly identify as Jacobsen's desired end: convincing the public to want nuclear weapons abolished. In a limited nuclear war scenario, we would be thanking God that we had nuclear weapons too, so our enemies could not dictate terms to us.
Good essay. I was in a strange position reading Jacobsen's book: I believe I may know, through quixotic reading and obsession, more about nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare than all people who do not either (a) have a Top Secret security clearance, and/or (b) study nuclear war professionally. What bothered me most in the book is that the illustrative scenario she has chosen is ludicrously unlikely. I would never place bets on what the first military use of nuclear weapons after Nagasaki will be (seems unvirtuous to do so), but a "bolt from the blue" attack like the one Jacobsen describes is absolutely not it. Vastly more likely is an escalatory dynamic where one power uses one or several tactical nuclear weapon to regain military momentum they are losing and to send a message of resolve to its opponents - think China striking a US aircraft carrier group if their invasion of Taiwan was bogging down. That would be an immensely dangerous and frightening scenario; I would confidently predict the mother of all one day stock market and economic crashes as panic overwhelmed people. That more realistic scenario is much more worth exploring, but it doesn't lead to what you correctly identify as Jacobsen's desired end: convincing the public to want nuclear weapons abolished. In a limited nuclear war scenario, we would be thanking God that we had nuclear weapons too, so our enemies could not dictate terms to us.
I've never really understood how to explicate "meaning" when used by philosophers of history as well historians.