“May you burn in hell like you are going to burn here.” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, upon ordering a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union at the conclusion of a Pentagon nuclear war game in 1983 For eighty years, the world has lived with the knowledge that a small number of nations have it in their power, in an instant, to commit genocide, to destroy civilization, and to eradicate most forms of life on Earth. In the main, international society has accommodated itself to this fact of the nuclear age in much the same way people accommodate themselves to the fact that they might be run over by a car, bitten by a shark, or attacked by an ax murderer. These events are all possible, of course, but none is felt constantly to be likely or imminent, and so each occupies space in dark precincts of the mind, emerging only occasionally through an act of the subconscious or when called forth by a tragic news report or a popcorn horror show. For the average global citizen, this coping mechanism is both understandable and necessary. For what is someone in Gabon, or Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Russia, or Pakistan really to do? Even in the United States, the successes of the peace movement of the 1980s had to do only with how many nuclear weapons the country would have, whether it needed to keep testing them, and where it would put them. Not trivial matters, to be sure, but matters that still had very little to do with what makes nuclear weapons so catastrophically dangerous. It is not, after all, strategy — numbers of warheads, projectile throw-weights, the placement of delivery systems, or their targets — that suspends humankind on the cliff-edge of oblivion. The danger isn’t physics and it isn’t politics. The danger is that nuclear restraint is a miracle, and the world is choosing to believe in it. 
In the early 1700s, a teenaged David Hume became captivated by the moral philosophy of the Stoics. Not satisfied simply to improve his intellect by consuming the works of Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, he determined also to put their teachings into practice — to follow their instructions about how to achieve happiness through the mastery of emotion and the honing of virtue. And so he embarked upon training his mind, living simply and exercising rigid self-restraint, engaging in deep introspection, and otherwise seeking to cultivate his ability to reason such that it would inure him to the pains and pleasures of life on earth. As he reported in a lengthy retrospective missive in the mid-1730s, this experiment not only cured him of his attraction to ancient moral philosophy, but also convinced him that the Stoics’ theory of human nature was bollocks. He had not emerged happier or more virtuous, as had been the promise. The victory of the rational over the emotional, in his experience, was Pyrrhic. This realization awoke in Hume the conviction that there was a need for a new theory of human nature, one on which a philosophy of how to live well could be built — a philosophy that, contrary to Stoicism, did not believe that happiness required negating corporeal sensations and internal passions, but that instead gave them their due. And so he set about to produce a “science of man.” He would use newly emerging techniques of scientific discovery — experimentation and observation — to uncover and explain the relationship between feeling and reasoning. This empiricism, he believed, was the necessary foundation for philosophy to have any chance of pointing the way to human happiness. The outcome of Hume’s inquiry was A Treatise on Human Nature, which he produced in his twenties. In it, Hume concludes from his own experiences together with his observations of the experiences of others, that reason and emotion are not severable from each other. What it is that humans experience as reason is the product of what they have felt, are feeling, and anticipate that they will feel. These feelings first are immediate sensory experiences, or what Hume calls the “violent passions” — fear, joy, anger, love, and so forth. They then are rendered down, through memory and reflection, into such “calm passions” as morality, sympathy, compassion, and justice. These passions, violent and calm, he says, are the forces that move people to act. Reason on its own, unmatched with a passion, is inert. It can identify facts and make associations, and so it can calculate which actions are more or less likely to make a person sad or happy, to satisfy greed or generosity, inspire fear, or call forth pride or shame. But reason alone cannot impel action; it cannot offer the purpose, only the means. And so, he says, reason “is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Hume thus patently rejected the ancients’ assumption that reason and emotion are in constant battle with each other, and that virtue is achieved and happiness is the reward when reason wins. And while he passed no judgment on the righteousness of it, he did consider instances in which it was the calm passions that motivated action to be evidence of “strength of mind.” Like the Stoics, however, Hume acknowledged that it was common for it to go the other way round — for the violent passions, which are felt immediately and vividly, to overpower the calm. This fact of human nature meant that strength of mind was not a talent to be exercised but a craft to be practiced; absent cultivation, the calm passions are too easily overrun. In 1945, the United States of America detonated two nuclear weapons over Japan, the first over Hiroshima and the second over Nagasaki. The extent and the duration of the devastation that those weapons caused was not immediately clear. It has since become very much so. The horrors that the people
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