Disarmament Scenarios

No First Use

No First Use of Nuclear Weapons

A Report of a Pugwash Workshop
November 2002

Long an advocate of no first use of nuclear weapons, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs held a workshop on this subject in London from November 15-17, 2002. The online workshop report, “No First Use of Nuclear Weapons” provides an excellent summary of this issue. Thirteen working papers are also available. Here are some of the highlights of the workshop report.

The report indicated, “It has long been argued in Pugwash circles among others that until such time as nuclear weapons can be eliminated the purpose of national nuclear forces should be confined to deterring nuclear attack.” Yet nuclear weapon states have rejected no first use from “the belief that nuclear weapons serve purposes extending beyond deterrence of nuclear attack”.

Possible uses of nuclear weapons have included:

planning for a pre-emptive nuclear strike in the event that nuclear war seemed inevitable,
preventive nuclear war in order to destroy an adversary’s incipient or developing nuclear weapons capability,
offset the conventional forces of an adversary at an affordable social and economic cost,
serve as a weapon of last resort in the face of catastrophic defeat,
threatened as a means of coercion and to deter chemical and biological weapons,
“demonstration” nuclear strikes as indication of a nation’s seriousness of intent in a developing conflict,
use of nuclear weapons for ballistic missile defense.

The report points out, “for the current nuclear weapon states to adopt strategies of no first use of nuclear weapons they need, logically speaking, only to take the view that the risks of retaining policies of ‘nuclear first use if necessary’ outweigh the risks of explicitly forgoing this option.”

To “reduce, to a large extent, the capacity and preparedness of a nation to use nuclear weapons first” would require “ a combination of declaratory policy, legal undertakings, changes in weapon deployments, and a general denuclearization of war planning, military exercises and training programs.”

Implementation of a strategy of no first use, pursued cooperatively among all the nuclear weapons states, would have these features:

Allow significantly smaller nuclear forces, as least on the part of the USA and Russia.
There would be no requirement for counterforce capabilities.
Weapons designed for tactical or battlefield operations ought also to be eliminated.
There would be no place in the arsenals for weapon for attacking underground targets.
Technical launch readiness of nuclear systems could also be relaxed and delays might be introduced into the decision-making process that would authorize nuclear use.
A more far-reaching measure of de-alerting could involve separating warheads from delivery systems and possibly placing warheads under civilian control.
At the extreme, each side would invite the other side or sides to place observers or technical means of verification at sites at which warheads were stored.