Disarmament Scenarios

Disarmament Scenarios

Steps toward Abolition: No First Use

Introduction

For decades proposals for no first use of nuclear weapons have been forthcoming. Under this approach nuclear weapons states would pledge to not initiate any use of nuclear weapons and to use them only for deterrence and for retaliation in event of attack by other nuclear weapons. A related approach is negative security assurances whereby nuclear weapon states promise to not use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state that is party to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). (There are variations to this promise.)

Of the five initial nuclear weapons states only China has a no first use policy. The Soviet Union announced no first use in 1982 but didn’t change the configuration of its deployed nuclear weapons. In 1993 Russia stated that no first use would no longer apply because of superiority of NATO conventional forces. India once had a no first use policy but modified it in 2003 to specify the possible use of nuclear weapons in response to chemical or biological weapon attack. The United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, and Pakistan currently reject no first use because they believe that there may be circumstances in which they would initiate use of nuclear weapons.

Joseph Rotblat, a founder of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, was a long-time advocate of no first use. In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, he insisted that “for the sake of humanity – we must get rid of all nuclear weapons.” He continued,

Achieving this goal will take time, but it will never happen unless we make a start. Some essential steps towards it can be taken now. Several studies, and a number of public statements by senior military and political personalities, testify that, except for disputes between the present nuclear states - all military conflicts, as well as threats to peace, can be dealt with using conventional weapons. This means that the only function of nuclear weapons, while they exist, is to deter a nuclear attack.

All nuclear weapon states should now recognize that this is so, and declare in treaty form that they will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. This would open the way to the gradual, mutual reduction of nuclear arsenals, down to zero. It would also open the way for a Nuclear Weapons Convention. This would be universal. It would prohibit all possession of nuclear weapons.

Two years later the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) made the case for no first use in a 1997 report on The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy. We offer a summary of their ideas.

Pugwash took up this topic in a workshop in November 2002. We highlight some of the findings of the workshop report and provide linkage to 13 working papers.

More recently Scott D. Sagan from Stanford University in an article in Survival has written “The Case for No First Use”. A subsequent issue of that journal offers comments by four experts with diverse views and Sagan’s rebuttal. We provide an abstract.

Many advocates of no first use favor the global elimination of nuclear weapons, but they realize that states possessing nuclear weapons are not ready to go that far at the present time. They see no first use as a step toward a world without nuclear weapons. This is the case with Alexei Arbatov in a research paper on “Non-First Use as a Way of Outlawing Nuclear Weapons’. Hui Zhang offers the same perspective in an article on “How No First Use Would Facilitate Nuclear Disarmament”. Howard Hallman considers this approach in an article on “Reflections on No First Use of NuclearWeapons”.

In this section we also deal with no first use as applied to specific nuclear weapons states.