Sole Power

By Chris Jones

As wonks everywhere anxiously await the release of the so-close-yet-so-far Nuclear Posture Review, one of the biggest unknowns is what the NPR will say about the role of nuclear weapons. Laura Rozen’s article last week about Biden’s speech contains yet another reformulation:

While appointees like Miller, and those from Tauscher's and Biden's shops are stepping up their role in the posture review, sources still expect that it will disappoint some on the left of the arms control community for not adopting, for instance, a no-first-use policy despite the urging of some allies like Japan.  Instead, disarmament experts expect the forthcoming NPR to state something along the lines of “The U.S. maintains nuclear weapons in order to deter or respond” to a nuclear attack, without explicitly saying “the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack on the U.S.” or to declare that the U.S. pledges to never use nuclear weapons first.  But the Union of Concerned Scientists' Stephen Young said progressives appreciate the constraints under which the administration is working. "Administration officials have been clear that, by setting out a more limited role for nuclear weapons, they want to make a sharp change from the 2001 Bush posture review," he said.

Over the past year, there has been increasingly recognition that, much like the debate about warhead modernization, there can be a “spectrum of options” about the role of nuclear weapons opposed to a binary between calculated ambiguity and No First Use. There’s a lot of weight riding on precisely how this statement gets phrased as the administration tries to successfully triangulate between reducing the role of nuclear weapons and satisfying deterrence and extended deterrence commitments. Striking the phrase “sole purpose” is an interesting change. While the spirit of the two statements above is probably very similar, one has to wonder how differences between the two could play out. Describing why nuclear weapons are maintained implicitly suggests their role yet fails to provide quite the same level of clarity as “sole purpose” (which provides less clarity than a complete No First Use declaration, for better or worse). Though nuclear weapons are “maintained” for a purpose (to deter nuclear weapons), that statement does not appear to explicitly foreclose their use for a purpose different than they the reason they are maintained. This may be chalked up to semantic squabbling or more unhelpful “what-ifs” but highlighting the differences between these formulations can shed light on all the different viewpoints the administrations are trying to resolve with different iterations of how to reduce the role of nuclear weapons.

Assuming the Nuclear Posture Review comes down somewhere in this ambiguous middle area between calculated ambiguity and No First Use, there will be two PR challenges facing the administration. The first is to convince those, at home and abroad, opposed to reducing the role of nuclear weapons that the U.S. didn’t give the deterrence farm away. These nonbinding formulations provide the administration some wiggle room but at the end of the day the spirit of these formulations still would seek to limit out, for example, the role of nuclear weapons in deterring CBW attacks. If the exchange in Survival is any indication, opinions on the issue are far from settled and so having a comprehensive explanation of how the United States deters CBW attacks and other missions eliminted by this new nuclear statement of purpose will be important.

Another piece of this puzzle to answer will be the international perception of a NFU-lite type statement. The Chinese, for example, consistently beat the NFU drum—how will they react to a statement saying nuclear weapons maintained to deter nuclear weapons. Is it a step in the right direction or more evidence of American efforts to slow roll Article VI commitments? What about the NNWS? A negative assurance could be part of a package to help curry their favor but an unwillingness to accept a complete NFU will still raise eyebrows (why could China and Russia agree to a full NFU?), even though the administration is probably handcuffed in how much they can undertake in the time and political space they have. Incremental change is rarely sexy but the administration should do everything they can to package what we have done, even if modest, as a valuable step forward. Whether people will bite is a whole separate question.