Tom Sauer (2020) Power and Nuclear Weapons: The Case of the European Union, Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, 3:1, 41-59, DOI: 10.1080/25751654.2020.1764260 As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt once stated: “The danger is that these [deterrence] theories are not only plausible because they take their evidence from actually discernable present trends, but that, because of their inner consistency, they have a hypnotic effect; they put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing else but our mental organ for perceiving, understanding, and dealing with reality and factuality” (quoted in Harrington 2016, 105–106)