NFU Zero

Picking up on last week’s discussion, one of the elephants in the NFU room is the domestic political feasibility of currently making such a pledge.  If the NPR were to come out in favor of such an approach that could provide some political traction for the administration but that seems unlikely.  In the exchange in Survival about NFU this month, Mort Halperin’s article was particularly interesting. While Scott Sagan takes Keith Payne and Bruno Tertrais head on about whether adopting NFU is a good idea, Halperin has “come to the conclusion that this is a good idea whose time has not yet come.”  He argues:

 There are other proposals to pursue this objective which would be as effective as a declaratory no-first-use policy and which might produce less controversy.  In his Prague speech, in addition to announcing support for the long-term objective of a world free of nuclear weapons, Obama committed himself in the short run to four other measures which have long been debated and which advance the same objectives as the no-first-use proposal. These are: reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US national security strategy, negotiating a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia, immediately and aggressively pursuing US ratification of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and starting negotiations on a verifiable end to the production of fissionable material for weapons purposes. This ambitious agenda will require all the attention and political capital the president can reasonably devote to this issue. Under the circumstances, no first use can and should be put off for another day. Seeking three treaties on nuclear arms control in his first term will not be easy.

Halperin’s assessment of priorities gets at the critical question, discussed last week, of what will be perceived as making the most progress on the Prague road to zero.  Halperin notes that bringing CTBT into force, which will be a difficult task both to get ratified at home and convince other holdouts abroad, “is the more important, and promising, effort to stigmatise nuclear weapons.”  CTBT, for better or worse, has become the lightening rod by which the NNWS judge, or say they judge, the United States commitment to nonproliferation.   As Deepti Choubey notes in her nuclear bargains article:

After acknowledging previous commitments, the United States has several additional options for demonstrating its seriousness about disarmament. When asked what would be the top three steps nuclear-weapon states could take to demonstrate their commitment to disarmament, a consensus emerged across states with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) rising to the top.

With a fully negotiated and enforceable FMCT some time off all eyes are focused in the interim on whether CTBT can happen domestically.  Given the adminstration’s focus on trying to get New START and CTBT (not to mention health care and climate), Halperin argues that until the president and the rest of Washington are ready to accept a full NFU pledge there could be a NFU zero that might be easier to sell. 

While Scott Sagan’s formulation would read:

The role of US nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear-weapons use by other nuclear weapons states against the United States, our allies, and our armed forces, and to be able respond, with an appropriate range of second-strike nuclear retaliation options, if necessary, in the event that deterrence fails

Halperin argues that the U.S. should say why it maintains nuclear weapons by declaring:

The United States maintains nuclear weapons to deter and, if necessary, respond to nuclear attacks against ourselves, our forces, or our friends and allies

And, in parallel, updating and simplify our negative assurance to NNWS to read:

The United States reaffirms that it 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

While Sagan notes in the conclusion of the debate that their formulations are ‘virtually identical,’ Halperin notes of his pledge that:

By not explicitly foreswearing the use of nuclear weapons against unexpected threats, such a declaration preserves ‘existential deterrence’ that is the inescapable consequence of having any nuclear weapons and avoids much, if not all, of the political fallout that would result from a no-first-use pledge.

If Halperin is correct that this formulation can successfully buy off a good degree of opposition by not explicitly foreswearing use, it could very well but a feasible strategy but tugs at how well that strategy succeeds in creating a real NFU taste with zero NFU calories.