Pax Atomica (

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

for “Atomic Peace”) is one of the terms that has sometimes been used to describe the period of severe tensions without a major military conflict between the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

and the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

during the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

. The term is also at times used to describe the entire post

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

/ post-atomic-bomb era.Chicken Pax Atomica: The Cold War Stability of Nuclear Deterrence. By James Pasley. Journal of International and Area Studies. Vol. 15, No. 2, December 2008. Pg. 21. In the phrase's narrower application, applying only to the Cold War era, the phrase refers to the argument that the stability between the two superpowers was caused by each side's large nuclear arsenals which led to a state of

Mutually Assured Destruction Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would result in ...

(MAD) and deterrence.Selassie, Bereket H. ''Eritrea and the United States''. The Red Sea Press, 1989, p. 2. That is, if one of the superpowers would have launched a nuclear attack, the other would have responded in the same way. This threatened the complete destruction of both countries and probably the entire northern hemisphere. John Lewis Gaddis has described the period as the Long Peace. In the phrase's broader application, applying to the entire post World War II era, the phrase refers to the argument that the possession of nuclear arms by several of the world's larger powers has tended to act to prevent the outbreak of full-scale warfare between any of these several powers, also due to the probability of MAD. The phrase Pax Atomica is derived from the more popular term

Pax Romana The (Latin for ) is a roughly 200-year-long period of Roman history that is identified as a golden age of increased and sustained Roman imperialism, relative peace and order, prosperous stability, hegemonic power, and regional expansion, a ...

, which describes the period of stability under Roman hegemony during the Roman Age.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pax Atomica Military terminology of the United States Nuclear warfare Atomica

See also

References