Il realismo politico e la bomba. Morgenthau, Niebuhr e la rivoluzione termonucleare

This article examines how two of the most authoritative exponents of classical political realism, Hans J. Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, confronted the moral and strategic implications of the nuclear age in the early 1960s. Drawing on Morgenthau's "Death in the Nuclear Age" (1961) and Niebuhr's "The Nuclear Dilemma" (1963), the article argues that both thinkers understood the advent of thermonuclear weapons as an epistemological rupture within the tradition of modern political thought — one that rendered obsolete the established categories of power, sovereignty, and collective survival. For Morgenthau, nuclear mass destruction annihilates the very meaning of individual death and historical memory, confronting humanity with a condition of existential absurdity to which no adequate political response has yet been elaborated. For Niebuhr, the nuclear dilemma takes the form of a structural irony inherent in collective human life: the impossibility of eliminating the risk of catastrophe through either multilateral disarmament or unilateral renunciation, given the survival instincts that govern political communities. Against both utopian and rationalist solutions, Niebuhr proposes a minimal form of Soviet-American partnership grounded in the shared fear of nuclear holocaust. The convergence between the two thinkers ultimately points toward an ethics of responsibility that takes seriously the irreducible unpredictability of the real and the structural vulnerability of the human condition.