President Obama wants the world to get rid of its nukes, eventually. But, for now, it's still official U.S. policy that America reserves the right to drop the first Bomb in an atomic war.

During the early 1980's – the peak of the late Cold War – the Soviet Union declared that it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. Many of America's strategic lions – most famously Robert McNamara, George Kennan, Gerard Smith, and McGeorge Bundy – said we should do the same. But we never did. Why not? Primarily because we thought we might actually use the weapons first. In my view, one of the three most likely ways that World War III would have started would have been with Red Army troops surging west across Europe. American conventional weapons probably couldn't have helped the French or West Germans stop them. But nuclear weapons could have.

The argument made by people like McNamara and Kennan was that declaring a policy of no first use could reduce tensions overall and reduce the odds of nuclear war in the other two ways that it was likely to break out between the superpowers. That would be with a conflict that gradually gets hotter and hotter (think Berlin in 1961 or Cuba in 1962) or with an accidental strike. Maybe Soviet radar would pick up what appeared to be incoming American ICBMs and order an immediate retaliation before realizing that it was really geese flying over Finland that they'd spotted. If America promised not to launch weapons first, the Kennan theory went, the Soviets would be less likely to launch theirs as a way of either pre-empting or responding to a false positive of an American attack.

I recently asked a number of former Soviet arms officials about this topic while doing research in Moscow. And almost all said that, yes, particularly during the early Reagan years – when tensions were extremely high – it would have made some difference for the U.S. to declare a policy of no first use. They obviously understood that such talk would have been nothing close to technologically or legally binding. But even the words would have soothed Soviet fears that the U.S. was actively planning a first strike and could have reduced the risk of disaster in the two scenarios described above. According to Viktor Koltunov, a Soviet arms negotiator and defense official, that announcing a policy of no first use “would really have had a lot of impact.”

Would a policy of no first use help the U.S. today? It might have a similar calming effect on Russia (and the specific refusal to declare might have an agitating effect). But the authors of a recent report to the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States seem to remain persuaded by the same arguments that convinced some of them decades before. A policy of no first use, they write, "would be unsettling to some U.S. allies" – which strikes me as code for Poland and other East European countries that have been invaded frequently in the past. The authors add that such a policy "would also undermine the potential contribution of nuclear weapons to the deterrence of attack by biological weapons."

As an addendum, one of the central critics of no first use – Paul Nitze, who authored the rebuttal in the* New York Times *to McNamara, Kennan, Bundy, and Smith – floated an interesting variation on the argument in the late 1950s. What if, he asked, the international community banned the first use of nuclear weapons on someone else's territory? In other words, what if you were only allowed to use weapons on your own territory?

He would later abandon this idea, perhaps because of all the weird game theory issues it would create. Under such a policy, for example, one's adversary would have an incentive to start an attack by heading directly for your cities. And fallout wouldn't stay within the launching nation's borders. And there's another issue that seems particularly ironic today. The country he talked about as the most likely beneficiary was an American ally that shared a large desolate border with the Soviet Union and that, he thought, might benefit from having nuclear weapons to fire on its own land to knock by the Sovets. What was that nation? Iran.

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