Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 163–182
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In his 5 April 2009 speech in Prague, US President Barack Obama promised that ‘to put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same’. The forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), mandated by Congress, provides the administration an opportunity to honour that commitment. To reduce the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategy, however, the next NPR must abandon the long-standing US policy of threatening to use its nuclear weapons first in a variety of military scenarios. This basic step was not taken in the George W. Bush administration’s 2001 NPR, despite its claim to institute ‘a major change in our approach to the role of nuclear offensive forces in our deterrent strategy’ and call to ‘both reduce our dependence on nuclear weapons and improve our ability to deter attack in the face of proliferating [weapons of mass destruction (WMD)] capabilities’. Indeed, the 2001 NPR contradicted these stated ambitions by maintaining that nuclear weapons were still necessary to ‘provide credible military options to deter a wide range of threats, including WMD and large-scale conventional military force’.
Is the threat of the first use of US nuclear weapons still necessary to deter the use of non-nuclear WMD (that is, chemical and biological weapons), and to deter the use of large-scale conventional military force? Or can Washington move toward a policy of no-first-use, limiting the role of nuclear weapons to deter the use of other states’ nuclear weapons against the United States and its friends and allies? Previous analyses of the appropriate role and missions for US nuclear forces, including earlier official nuclear posture reviews, have been too narrow, focusing exclusively on the contribution of nuclear weapons to deterrence and not examining the effects of the American nuclear posture and declaratory policy on the wider set of US and allied objectives regarding non-proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Because of this focus, previous government and academic analyses have both exaggerated the potential military and diplomatic costs of a no-first-use doctrine and have seriously underestimated its potential benefits. There were strong and obvious reasons why Washington maintained and advertised a range of first-use options throughout the Cold War: NATO faced a massive conventional threat from the Warsaw Pact and the United States and its allies in East Asia were confronted by the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea. But these options are no longer necessary. Examination of the costs and benefits suggests that the United States should, after appropriate consultation with allies, move toward adopting a nuclear-weapons no-first-use declaratory policy by stating that ‘the role of US nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear weapons use by other nuclear-weapons states against the United States, our allies, and our armed forces, and to be able respond, with an appropriate range of nuclear retaliation options, if necessary, in the event that deterrence fails’.
Mine is by no means the first call for reduced reliance on...
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Scott D. Sagan is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Co-Director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
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