{"id":76254,"date":"2026-04-23T01:00:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T05:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=76254"},"modified":"2026-04-22T09:57:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T13:57:39","slug":"qotd-the-problems-of-a-no-first-use-nuclear-weapons-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/04\/23\/qotd-the-problems-of-a-no-first-use-nuclear-weapons-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The problems of a “no first use” nuclear weapons policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Now, you might ask at this point: why not defuse some of this tension with a “no first use” policy \u2013 openly declare that you won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons even in a non-nuclear conflict?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the United States during the Cold War, the problem with declaring a “no first use” policy was the worry that it would essentially serve as a “green light” for conventional Soviet military action in Europe. Recall, after all, that the Soviet military was stronger in conventional forces in Europe during the Cold War and that episodes like the Berlin Blockade (and resultant Berlin Airlift) seemed to confirm Soviet interest in expanding their control over central Europe. At the same time, the Soviet use of military force to crush the Hungarian Revolution (1956) and the Prague Spring (1968) continued to reaffirm that the USSR had no intention of letting Central or Eastern Europe choose their own fates \u2013 this was an empire that ruled by domination and intended to expand if it could.<\/p>\n

The solution to blocking that expansion was NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Not because NATO collectively could defeat the USSR in a conventional war \u2013 the general assumption was that they probably couldn’t \u2013 but because NATO’s article 5 clause pledging mutual defense essentially meant that the nuclear powers of NATO (Britain, the United States, and France) pledged to defend the territory of all NATO members with nuclear weapons. But just like deterrence, mutual defense alliances are based on the perception that all members will defend each other. Declaring that the United States wouldn’t use nuclear weapons first would essentially be telling the Germans, “we’ll fight for you, but we won’t use our most powerful weapons for you” in the event of a conventional war; it would be creating a giant<\/em> unacceptable asterisk next to that mutual defense clause.<\/p>\n

So the United States had to be committed to at least the possibility<\/em> that it would respond to a conventional military assault on West Germany with nuclear retaliation (often envisaged as a “tactical” use of nuclear weapons \u2013 that is, using smaller nuclear weapons against enemy military formations. That said, even in the 1950s, Bernard Brodie was already warning that restraining the escalation to general use of nuclear weapons once a tactical nuclear weapon was used would be practically impossible).<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2022-03-11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now, you might ask at this point: why not defuse some of this tension with a “no first use” policy \u2013 openly declare that you won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons even in a non-nuclear conflict? For the United States during the Cold War, the problem with declaring a “no first use” policy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,5,41,1119,13,663],"tags":[1457,108,220,107,433,1436],"class_list":["post-76254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","category-russia","category-usa","category-weapons","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-coldwar","tag-nato","tag-nukes","tag-sovietunion","tag-westgermany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jPU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76254"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102038,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76254\/revisions\/102038"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}