When the question of building a new generation of nuclear weapons came up at a fundraiser for Al Franken in mid-2007, his former Saturday Night Live colleague Jane Curtin quipped, "but we never used the old ones," reacting as if her son or daughter were asking for a new scooter. Strictly speaking, we actually did use the really old ones, but as Paul Richter reported in Monday's LA Times, the question of when the United States might use its current arsenal of weapons is being hotly debated within the US government. Having written before about the importance of the impending results of the Nuclear Posture Review and the need to sharply curtail the purpose and function of nuclear weapons, I want to flag some persuasive ideas from New America Foundation's Jeffrey Lewis over at Arms Control Wonk.
The upshot of Jeffrey's argument is that a pledge that the US won't be the first to launch nuclear weapons in any confrontation might not be the best way to limit their military role. He argues that the declaration of our posture should focus on the reasons for having these weapons rather than the scenarios for their use. Trying to make categorical statements about when you would or wouldn't mount a nuclear attack only leads to tortured discussions of exceptional and implausible scenarios. I recommend reading Jeffrey's entire post, but here's his key point:
As for talking about nuclear use scenarios -- well, the only way to win is not play! Look, you can always come up with an artificial, hypothetical that would compel the first use of a nuclear weapon against a kindergarten. (The kindergarten is sitting on top of a deeply buried bunker containing the Andromeda strain and there isn't enough time to evacuate...)
No good can come of speculating on such hypothetical scenarios because the deck is stacked against you. Moreover, there is no reason to play these games, because such unlikely scenarios are irrelevant to our nuclear policy, force structure or posture.
...
It's much better to state that neither of these cases -- nor the truly weird cases like asteroids -- have anything to do with why the United the States maintains a nuclear deterrent. United States nuclear policies, forces and posture are not shaped by the need to deter biological weapons or deflect asteroids. That's the implicit meaning of the President's statement that the United States seeks the security of a world without nuclear weapons: That all plausible non-nuclear threats can be met with conventional forces.
So if it's better to make a declaration about the rationale for our nuclear arsenal, what should such a declaration say? To answer this, Lewis cites his colleague Mort Halperin's contribution to an interchange on no-first-use sparked by Scott Sagan in the journal Survivial. Halperin's proposed basic formulation would be:
The United States maintains nuclear weapons to deter and, if necessary, respond to nuclear attacks against ourselves, our forces, or our friends and allies.
Halperin also advocates a declaration that would give so-called negative security assurances to non-nuclear weapon nations that are parties in good standing to the Non-proliferation Treaty.
The United States will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon state-parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons that are in compliance with their nuclear nonproliferation obligations.
This would not only respond to the need for the US to provide reassurance in the negotiations with Iran and North Korea, it would also reaffirm the central importance of the NPT. The one perplexing point in the Halperin piece concerns the relationship between the no-first-use issue and potential Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Halperin offers a good analysis of the pressures and objections from conservative Republicans as they relate to the crowded nuclear policy agenda and particularly the sequencing for the Senate's legislative agenda. He says that CTBT ratification must come before the no-first-use issue. As a matter of priorities, I suppose that's true. But as a matter of the calendar and basing the policy on sound strategic footing, I don't see how it can be. Even with the current delays, the Nuclear Posture Review is bound to precede debate over the CTBT, and if the nuclear posture fudges the issue of a narrow role for the weapons, doesn't that strengthen arguments against the test ban? Either way, it points to the need to synch up the posture with the treaty ratification push.
10th Anniversary of CNDP
. Appeal to dedicate "human rights day" on December 10, 2010 to the theme of RIGHT TO A NUCLEAR WEAPON FREE WORLD IS A HUMAN RIGHT...Read more
We want a nuclear weapons-free world and we support all genuine efforts in pursuit of this goal. In this effort, we commit ourselves to the global movement for nuclear disarmament and abolition of nuclear weapons, and will strive to strengthen international solidarity in this endeavour.
