No First Use of Nuclear Weapons: Rejecting Nuclear Annihilation
Photo by Ronan Furuta
The recent collapse of nuclear weapons talks between China and the United States in July 2024, followed the withdrawal by the U.S. and Russia from long-established nuclear weapons treaties, like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, (ABM) Intermediate-Range Forces Treaty (INF), and The Iran Nuclear Deal (JPCOA). Nuclear tensions have regressed to dangerous levels not seen since the Cold War.
China suspended nuclear weapons negotiations with the U.S. in Geneva, blaming high levels of arms sales from the U.S. to Taiwan. Earlier nuclear weapons meetings in November 2023 turned accusatory as the U.S. complained of China’s “lack of transparency” and a failure to agree on “risk reduction strategies” while rebuffing the PRC’s offer of a No First Use agreement. China has expanded its nuclear arsenal to 500 warheads, predicted to reach 1000 warheads by 2030. The U.S. contends this arms buildup is inconsistent with China’s No First Use offer. The U.S. currently deploys 1770 warheads and keeps over 5000 warheads in reserve.
The U.S. says China’s proffer of a No First Use agreement is disingenuous because China is constructing hundreds of new ICBM silos in the northwest region of the country. Apace, the U.S. is replacing 400 launch silos in the American northwest to house the new $140 billion Sentinel ICBM fleet.
China blames the U.S. for violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) provision to “reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons” by maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal and for threatening the first nuclear strikes to protect its allies under the American “nuclear umbrella”. Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are now protected by U.S. nuclear weapons through mutual defense treaties. White papers from think tanks like The Atlantic Council recommend the inclusion of Taiwan as well under the U.S. nuclear umbrella increasing the geo-political friction surrounding U.S. / China nuclear negotiations.
Ironically, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) are nuclear-armed countries. However, China remains the only permanent member of the UN Security Council, to adopt the No First Use of nuclear weapons. The other four permanent members, the U.S. U.K., France, and Russia are nuclear-armed states but with nuclear postures that include launching nuclear first strikes.
Lost in this dissonant diplomacy confounding nuclear negotiations seems to be the bedrock principle of nuclear deterrence as a defense. Modern nuclear weapons are so lethal that no aggressor would risk a nuclear first strike understanding nuclear retaliation would be inescapable and would inflict unacceptable loss.
The macabre calculus of mutually assured destruction, MAD, plus abundant good luck, have prevented nuclear attacks since 1945. No First Use achieves the same security balance through mutually agreed verifiable treaties without building diabolical weapons systems.
Past presidents mulling the option of ordering a nuclear first strike during difficult military situations have all determined that the international opprobrium and political isolation following a nuclear first strike by the U.S. would far outweigh any military advantage on the battlefield.
The sheer revulsion wrought in the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has impeded their further use to this day. A “nuclear taboo” (see Tannenwald) has restrained military leaders from launching nuclear attacks: in Korea (Truman, 1950) in the Taiwan Straits (Eisenhower, 1958), Cuba, (Kennedy 1962), Vietnam, (Nixon 1969), Iraq, (both Bushes), and probably more.
Recent predictions by U.S. Air Force generals of an inevitable nuclear war between the U.S. and China, “by 2025”, have not helped nuclear weapons negotiators’ work to build trust. Curbing bellicose threats and enhancing shared goals for a future secure from nuclear attack should be the policy of any administration and its military leaders.
If Kamala Harris is elected president, she should finally include No First Use of nuclear weapons in her Nuclear Posture Review, something both Presidents Obama and Biden had promised to do, but failed to deliver.
No First Use of nuclear weapons provides the only assurance that the first use of nuclear weapons will not degenerate into general nuclear war. Princeton’s Science and Security Lab predicts such a scenario. In the Lab’s simulations, Russia targets massing NATO troops with a small tactical nuclear weapon, i.e. 12 kilotons, the destructive power of the Hiroshima A-bomb. NATO responds with its own tactical nukes. Within three hours both belligerents trade multiple nuclear salvos and suffer millions of deaths and casualties. The carnage cannot stop here, though; the long-dreaded mare of nuclear war spirals out of control.
Russia, Europe and the U.S. escalate, targeting each other’s cities with evermore powerful strategic thermo-nuclear weapons. Within minutes, 80 million souls are dead.
As ghoulish as this scenario sounds it would only be the beginning of the end of a nuclear war started with a single nuclear “warning shot”. Radio-active fallout from the bombing would poison fields, forests, rivers, lakes, and oceans for decades and even centuries.
“Nuclear winter” (see Robock) caused by plumes of dust and debris blasting into the atmosphere, would drop the Earth’s temperature below freezing for decades and potentially kill most of life on Earth.
No militarist or nuclear weapons proponent can prove full-scale nuclear cataclysm will not result from the first use of nuclear weapons. The hazards of a nuclear first strike cannot be managed and are not worth the risks. Implicit in the posture of nuclear deterrence is that no nuclear strike is worth the ensuing counter-attack.
Strategic security can be attained by a verifiable No First Use treaty. The great majority of the world’s states and their people agree with NFU policies. Nuclear powers have already committed not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear armed countries, the vast majority of states on Earth. Nuclear Weapons Free Zones comprising 40 percent of the world’s population, have been excluded from nuclear target lists.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty governing nuclear weapons came into force in 1970 with over 190 countries now signatories. Explicit in the NPT is the agreement by nuclear weapon states to reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Refusal by these nuclear weapon states to fulfill their responsibilities, curtail their nuclear “modernization” programs (costing trillions of dollars), reduce the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals, and to agree to a No First Use of nuclear weapons has caused the quinquennial NPT Review Conferences to fail over the last fifteen years. The oldest and most significant nuclear weapons treaty currently in effect is fraying.
No First Use of nuclear weapons was first promoted by a large contingent of scientists working on the Manhattan Project even before the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Leo Szilard, who patented nuclear fission in 1933, and who along with Albert Einstein urged President Roosevelt to fund the production of the first atomic bombs, also petitioned President Truman in early 1945, to delay using the atomic bomb because of moral and ethical concerns.
Though the Szilard Petition was quashed by Robert Oppenheimer and never reached Truman, Szilard and Einstein, aghast at the destructive power of the nuclear weapons they had helped create, founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists that to this day promotes nuclear disarmament and No First Use of nuclear weapons. Einstein regretted his letter to FDR propelling the Manhattan Project, as “the one great mistake of my life”. He worked for world peace for the remainder of his life. He even consulted Sigmund Freud perplexed by the seeming “death wish” compelling humankind to perpetual war.
As the “hibakusha”, survivors of the A-bombing of Japan, die away, will their warnings against nuclear weapons fade with them? Whether the “nuclear taboo” and hideous memories of the A-bombings of Japan remain strong enough to discourage new generations of war leaders from nuclear weapons folly is hoped for but should not be relied upon.
The history of nuclear weapons negotiations since 1945 is marked by missed opportunities and distrust. The United Nations itself was founded expressly to avoid nuclear war, with the establishment of its First Committee. In 1946 the Soviet Union offered to ban all nuclear weapons, the U.S. countered with its Baruch Plan, freezing the U.S. and USSR nuclear weapons stockpiles at current levels; 7 U.S. nukes and no USSR nukes. The U.S. proposed the new International Atomic Energy Commission to regulate fissile materials instead. The Soviets called the Baruch Plan “U.S. nuclear hegemony” and proceeded with their nuclear weapons development.
Great debate occurred within the Truman Administration on whether to develop the fusion hydrogen bomb after the Soviets conducted their first fission A-bomb test in 1949. David Lilienthal, Dean Acheson, Robert Oppenheimer and others advised the U.S. to halt the development of the exponentially more destructive hydrogen bomb Truman rejected their reports, convinced by “technological fanatics” i.e. Edward Teller, to build and test a thermo-nuclear weapon, “The Super”, whose only purpose, according to Lilienthal, was genocide.
In Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 Soviet leader Michele Gorbachev proposed to U.S. President Ronald Reagan the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The U.S. declined, instead funding Reagan’s fabulist Strategic Defense Initiative, aka SDI, aka Star Wars, aka a trillion dollars wasted.
Decades of distrust, paranoia and the chimera of nuclear weapons security have spawned a new nuclear arms race today. The current decline of nuclear weapons control negotiations, augurs ill for our future. If “man has war in his heart” and if peace remains beyond human capacity, at least nuclear weapons should be forsworn. Codifying No First Use of nuclear weapons agreements will be a first step back from the brink (see Back from the Brink) of looming nuclear disaster.
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