On 12 October 2022, the French President seemed worried about the growing number of references to nuclear weapons in the public arena following Russian threats, and declared on the France 2 national television channel: ‘The less we talk about nuclear weapons, the more credible they are.’ It is certainly the case that we usually do not talk about them, except during occasional panics whenever a crisis or a threat suddenly reminds us of the destructive capacity of these weapons and the inability of states to protect their populations from nuclear explosions...