When faced with a paradox, our immediate instinct is to try to resolve it. But as Orwell makes clear through the concept of doublethink, attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable achieve only the corrosion of language and thought. Contradictions should be seen not as flaws but as fundamental features of nuclear strategy. Does this consign nuclear strategists—and, by extension, the societies they serve—to perpetual discomfort? Likely it does. But discomfort at the thought of nuclear use can hardly be considered a bad thing.