Photo by Ronan Furuta
The recent failure of nuclear arms talks between China and the United States in July 2024 followed the withdrawal of the United States and Russia from long-standing nuclear weapons treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the Intermediate-Range Forces Treaty (INF), and the Iran Nuclear Deal (JPCOA). Nuclear tensions have dropped to dangerous levels not seen since the Cold War.
China has suspended nuclear arms talks with the US in Geneva, blaming high US arms sales to Taiwan. Previous nuclear arms meetings in November 2023 turned accusatory, with the US bemoaning China’s “lack of transparency” and inability to agree on “risk reduction strategies” while rejecting the People’s Republic of China’s offer for a no-first-use agreement. China has expanded its nuclear arsenal to 500 warheads and plans to grow to 1,000 warheads by 2030. The US claims this buildup contradicts China’s no-first-use offer. The US currently deploys 1,770 warheads and holds over 5,000 warheads in reserve.
The US considers China’s offer of a no-first-use waiver to be dishonest, as China is building hundreds of new ICBM silos in the country’s northwest. At the same time, the US is replacing 400 launch silos in the American northwest to accommodate the new $140 billion Sentinel ICBM fleet.
China accuses the US of violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) provision on the “reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons” by maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal and threatening to launch a nuclear strike to protect its allies under the US “nuclear umbrella.” Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand are now protected from US nuclear weapons by mutual defense treaties. White papers from think tanks such as the Atlantic Council recommend that Taiwan be included under the US nuclear umbrella, further increasing geopolitical tensions surrounding the US-China nuclear negotiations.
Ironically, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) are nuclear powers. However, China is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council that has committed to non-first use of nuclear weapons. The other four permanent members, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia, are nuclear powers, but their nuclear weapons have the capability of conducting nuclear first strikes.
In this dissonant diplomacy, which complicates nuclear negotiations, the basic principle of nuclear deterrence as a defensive measure seems to be lost. Modern nuclear weapons are so lethal that no attacker would risk a nuclear first strike if it knew that a nuclear retaliation would be inevitable and cause unacceptable losses.
The macabre calculation of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and a lot of luck have prevented nuclear attacks since 1945. With “No First Use” the same balance of security is achieved through mutually agreed and verifiable contracts without the need to build diabolical weapons systems.
All previous presidents who considered the option of a nuclear first strike in difficult military situations concluded that the international shame and political isolation that would follow a US nuclear first strike would far outweigh any military advantage on the battlefield.
The sheer revulsion that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki triggered has prevented their further use to this day. A “nuclear taboo” (see Tannenwald) has prevented military leaders from launching nuclear attacks: in Korea (Truman, 1950), in the Taiwan Strait (Eisenhower, 1958), in Cuba (Kennedy 1962), in Vietnam (Nixon 1969), in Iraq (both Bushes) and probably in many other countries.
Recent predictions by U.S. Air Force generals that nuclear war between the U.S. and China will be inevitable “by 2025” have not helped confidence-building efforts by nuclear negotiators. Containing belligerent threats and strengthening shared goals for a future safe from nuclear attack should be the policy of every government and its military leaders.
If Kamala Harris is elected president, she should finally include non-first use of nuclear weapons in her Nuclear Posture Review. Both President Obama and President Biden promised to do this but failed to do so.
No first use of nuclear weapons is the only guarantee that the first use of nuclear weapons will not escalate into a general nuclear war. Princeton’s Science and Security Lab predicts such a scenario. In the laboratory’s simulations, Russia attacks NATO troops en masse with a small tactical nuclear weapon, namely 12 kilotons, the destructive power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. NATO responds with its own tactical nuclear weapons. Within three hours, both warring parties exchange several nuclear salvos and mourn millions of dead and injured. But the bloodbath does not end there; the long-feared nuclear war spirals out of control.
Russia, Europe and the USA escalate and attack each other’s cities with increasingly powerful strategic thermonuclear weapons. Within minutes, 80 million people are dead.
As cruel as this scenario sounds, it would be only the beginning of the end of a nuclear war that would have started with a single nuclear “warning shot.” The radioactive fallout from the bombing would poison fields, forests, rivers, lakes and seas for decades and even centuries.
A “nuclear winter” (see Robock), caused by clouds of dust and debris shooting into the atmosphere, would cause the temperature on Earth to drop below freezing for decades and possibly destroy most of life on Earth.
No militarist or nuclear weapons advocate can prove that the first use of nuclear weapons would not result in a full-scale nuclear catastrophe. The dangers of a nuclear first strike are uncontrollable and not worth the risk. The nuclear deterrence stance implies that no nuclear strike is worth the subsequent counterstrike.
Strategic security can be achieved through a verifiable non-first use treaty. The vast majority of the world’s states and their populations agree to the non-first use guidelines. The nuclear powers have already committed themselves not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon countries, which is the vast majority of the world’s states. Nuclear-weapon-free zones, where 40 percent of the world’s population lives, have been excluded from the lists of nuclear targets.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty entered into force in 1970 and has now been signed by over 190 countries. The NPT explicitly includes the obligation of nuclear weapon states to reduce and destroy their nuclear arsenals. The refusal of these nuclear weapon states to meet their obligations to limit their (trillion-dollar) nuclear “modernization” programs, reduce the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals, and agree to a no-first-use policy has led to the failure of the NPT’s five-year review conferences over the past 15 years. The oldest and most important nuclear weapons treaty currently in force is crumbling.
A large group of scientists working on the Manhattan Project called for the rejection of the first use of nuclear weapons even before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Leo Szilard, who patented nuclear fission in 1933 and, together with Albert Einstein, urged President Roosevelt to finance the production of the first atomic bombs, also submitted a petition to President Truman in early 1945 to postpone the use of the atomic bomb for moral and ethical reasons.
Although the Szilard petition was rejected by Robert Oppenheimer and never reached Truman, Szilard and Einstein, appalled by the destructive power of the nuclear weapons they had helped develop, founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which to this day advocates nuclear disarmament and non-first use of nuclear weapons. Einstein regretted his letter to FDR promoting the Manhattan Project as “the one great mistake of my life.” He worked for world peace for the rest of his life. He even consulted Sigmund Freud, baffled by the apparent “death wish” that compels humanity to perpetual war.
When the “hibakusha,” the survivors of the atomic bombings of Japan, die, will their warnings about nuclear weapons also fade? One can only hope that the “nuclear taboo” and the horrific memories of the atomic bombings of Japan will remain strong enough to deter new generations of war leaders from the folly of nuclear weapons, but this should not be relied upon.
The history of nuclear arms negotiations since 1945 is marked by missed opportunities and mistrust. The United Nations itself, with the establishment of its First Committee, was expressly founded to avoid nuclear war. In 1946, the Soviet Union offered to ban all nuclear weapons, the US countered with its Baruch Plan, freezing US and USSR nuclear weapons stockpiles at current levels: 7 US nuclear weapons and no USSR nuclear weapons. The US instead proposed that the new International Atomic Energy Commission regulate fissile material. The Soviets labeled the Baruch Plan “US nuclear hegemony” and continued their nuclear weapons development.
After the Soviets conducted their first fission atomic bomb test in 1949, major debates arose within the Truman administration over the development of the hydrogen fusion bomb. David Lilienthal, Dean Acheson, Robert Oppenheimer and others advised the United States to abandon development of the exponentially more destructive hydrogen bomb. Truman rejected their reports and allowed himself to be persuaded by “technology fanatics” such as Edward Teller to build and test a thermonuclear weapon called “Super,” whose sole purpose, according to Lilienthal, was genocide.
In Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed to U.S. President Ronald Reagan that all nuclear weapons be abolished. The U.S. refused and instead funded Reagan’s fictitious Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as SDI or Star Wars – a trillion dollars wasted.
Decades of mistrust, paranoia and the chimera of nuclear weapons safety have today produced a new nuclear arms race. The current decline in negotiations on nuclear weapons control does not bode well for our future. If “man has war in his heart” and peace continues to be beyond human capacity, then at least nuclear weapons should be abandoned. Codifying agreements on the non-first use of nuclear weapons would be a first step back from the brink of impending nuclear catastrophe (see Back from the Brink).
