You Might Want to Know: Are They Useless? XVI-When Might It Be Okay to Use Them? II
“Deterrence,” we often hear, is the “sole purpose” of our nuclear weapons.
Does that mean that if we are attacked with nuclear weapons—meaning deterrence has failed—we’d have no reason to use them?
If we were attacked with nuclear weapons and did use ours to retaliate, and we almost certainly would, we’d need some justification other than deterrence. Revenge maybe?
A desire for revenge might explain why we attacked someone with nuclear weapons who had attacked us with them but would it justify that action? I can’t see how.
A kind of corollary of the “sole purpose” doctrine is the No First Use doctrine. This doctrine declares that in any conflict, the Nuclear Weapons State that has adopted the policy will not be the first to use nuclear weapons.
Adopting this policy would appear to rule out the use of nuclear weapons to respond to an attack that had used conventional weapons, no matter how serious the danger had become. It would also rule out the use of nuclear weapons to respond to an attack with weapons of mass destruction of the chemical or biological kind.
Only China and India now claim to have adopted a policy of No First Use. The United States never has adopted it. President Barack Obama wanted to but got talked out of it, it seems, by his Secretary of Defense, Bill Gates, who argued that we might need nuclear weapons to respond to an attack with chemical or biological weapons. By a country presumably, rather than by a stateless terrorist group. Nuclear weapons wouldn’t be of any use to retaliate on a stateless terrorist group, would they? I’m not sure how it was thought nuclear weapons would be useful to respond to an attack with chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction, but there you are. That’s our official thinking.
During the Cold War, both sides had worked to develop offensive chemical and biological weapons, as well as, of course, nuclear weapons. We ourselves are no longer developing offensive chemical or biological weapons though I’m sure we are still working on defensive measures against such weapons. President Nixon put a stop to our work on offensive biological weapons. And in 1997, we joined other nations in a convention that prohibited the manufacture and storage of chemical weapons.
Now if we were attacked with chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction and wanted to respond with a WMD of our own, we’d have only our nuclear weapons to respond with.
We still have plenty of nuclear weapons. Several thousand. That should be plenty.
Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union adopted No First Use in 1982, during the Cold War, but Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation repudiated it in 1993, after the Cold War had ended. They repudiated it, Putin said, because our President George W. Bush had withdrawn us from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty President Nixon had signed with the Soviets in 1974.
Let’s think about this. If a country had adopted the policy of No First Use and it or maybe one of its allies was being presented with an existential threat by someone’s conventional forces or non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, do you think that country would refrain from using any nuclear weapons it might have? If they could figure out how it made military sense to use those nuclear weapons? Or maybe even if they couldn’t?
What if their leaders weren’t the kind who see themselves as servants of their people but instead autocrats who see themselves as a kind of embodiment of their people? Might they define a threat to themselves personally as “existential”?
In his first foreign policy speech, delivered in Prague in 2009, Barack Obama said that
One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival.
No end to what the consequences might be, he said. Of one nuclear weapon exploded on one city.
That’s true, isn’t it?
He went on to say,
Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -– that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
There is talk today of using nuclear weapons in current conflicts.
If President Obama was right about the deeply unforseeable consequences of the use of even one nuclear weapon, and I believe he was, and also right that the spread, or by implication, the continued existence of nuclear weapons requires us to admit to ourselves that nuclear weapons will one day be used, and I believe he was, then the answer to when it could be justifiable to use nuclear weapons is—never.
We must commit ourselves to getting them out of our world, even if today we can see no way to get there.
Next: You Might Want to Know: Are They Useless XVII—Nuclear Winter? Really?