At the beginning of 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren introduced the No First Use Act to the Senate, which contained only one sentence: “It is the policy of the United States to not use nuclear weapons first”. That summer, she tweeted a similar sentiment, saying (in part), “The U.S. is not going to use nuclear weapons preemptively, and we need to say so to the entire world”. Since this is essentially the only time, at least in this race, that a presidential candidate has made a public statement about nuclear strategy, I think this is a good opportunity to discuss the basics of nuclear doctrine and to take a look at the policy of No First Use (NFU).

Broadly speaking, there are two related but distinct things that need to be looked at to understand a state’s nuclear strategy. The more tangible of the two is what I would describe as force structure, or the physical aspect of a country’s nuclear force. This includes the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal, the yield of those weapons, delivery vehicles (missiles, submarines, airplanes), communications infrastructure, etc. Since this post is not primarily about force structure, I won’t be going into detail about any of these things. Instead, I’ll simply note that force structure should be determined by doctrine.

The second aspect of a state’s nuclear strategy is its doctrine. A country’s nuclear doctrine is the set of rules that determines when and how its nuclear weapons will be used. NFU, if implemented, would be part of the United States’ nuclear doctrine that addresses the question of “when”. It’s an extremely simple rule – a nuclear version of “do not fire unless fired upon”. The US would not be the first country to implement such a rule; NFU is currently part of China’s and India’s nuclear doctrines, and was briefly part of the Soviet Union/Russia’s doctrine.

===COUNTERFORCE VS COUNTERVALUE===

Unlike NFU, which addresses the question of when nuclear weapons will be used, counterforce and countervalue strategies are elements of doctrine that address how nuclear weapons will be used – specifically, what their targets will be. A country with a counterforce strategy plans to use its strategic nuclear weapons against elements of the enemy’s nuclear force structure to prevent them from launching their nuclear weapons. Countervalue, as the name suggests, targets what the enemy country values – primarily its citizens and its economic base. In practice, countervalue targeting is synonymous with city targeting.

The case for countervalue targeting is simple – the mere possibility of apocalyptic levels of destruction should be enough to stop an adversary from committing aggression that may lead to a nuclear war. If you were the USSR, for example, would you willingly attempt to conquer West Germany and France if it meant entering into a general nuclear war with the United States in which tens of millions of your own citizens would be killed over the course of a few hours, and the survivors were left to inhabit an impoverished and irradiated wasteland? Advocates for countervalue strategies would argue that the answer to this question is “obviously not” – in fact, Robert Jervis, a well-known advocate for a small nuclear force with a countervalue doctrine, wrote a book entitled “The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution” in which he argues that military competition between great powers is essentially over because of nuclear weapons.

While it would be great if the above picture was true, and we could do away with international conflict for the low, low price of a few hundred nuclear warheads per state, such strategies are inherently flawed, and cannot prevent nuclear conflicts (or conventional ones, but that’s the topic of a future post). In fact, countervalue second-strike strategies have major strategic and moral issues that make them essentially useless for major powers.

The primary strategic issue with a countervalue targeting strategy is that it involves a threat that isn’t credible against either counterforce strategies or even other countervalue strategies. Countervalue strategies deter by making the enemy believe that they will be destroyed if they attack. But unless the targeted country has handed its launch authority over to computers or accidentally allows launches by rogue officers, the attacking country has good reason to believe that the targeted country will never launch its nuclear weapons.

It’s easy to see why this is the case, especially if the attacker has a counterforce strategy. Let’s take as an example the United States and China, who have counterforce and countervalue strategies, respectively. If, next Tuesday, the US decided to launch a strike against China’s ~300 nuclear weapons, and was 95% successful, what would the PRC do with its 15 remaining weapons? The answer is simple: nothing. Once the attacker launches its weapons, the logic of the countervalue targeting strategy is flipped on its head; why would the Chinese use their small remaining arsenal to retaliate against US cities if the Americans could rain down even MORE destruction upon Chinese cities? In my mind, this is the primary failure of countervalue targeting strategies; it never makes sense to use your weapons for their intended purpose, even AFTER you’ve been attacked!

A related problem is that under a countervalue targeting scheme, you lose all coercive leverage by actually using your weapons. Countervalue targeting is theoretically effective because the enemy’s cities are “hostages” that you can threaten with destruction if you are attacked. If, in the above scenario, the Chinese used their 15 remaining weapons to destroy the 10-15 largest American cities, what would stop the Americans from telling China “if you don’t surrender and use your entire economy to rebuild the United States, we’ll destroy 1 of your cities at random per week until you do”? Nothing – the PRC killed its American “hostages”. The Americans now have nothing to lose, and the Chinese everything!

Of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s sensible to attack nuclear weapons states with countervalue strategies willy-nilly – computer errors do occur, militaries could sometimes have rogue officers, and the intense stress created by crisis situations could lead political leaders to do things that are not in their country’s best interest. In that sense, having a countervalue strategy is probably better than having nothing at all, because it introduces risk into an attacker’s calculus. Keep in mind, however, that countries with these strategies are incentivized to both exaggerate how much these factors matter and to do everything in their power to stop them from actually mattering. China, for example, will try its hardest to convince US policymakers and academics that its officers in the strategic rocket forces would launch their missiles in a patriotic fervor, consequences be damned, if the US were to attack. Behind the scenes, however, there is little doubt that the PRC is trying very hard to ensure that that couldn’t happen. China has traditionally taken a very conservative approach to its nuclear weapons, and there could be no greater nightmare for Beijing than a situation in which they’ve lost control of their own forces in a way that could lead to the destruction of their own country.

===NFU AND TARGETING DOCTRINES===

You likely noticed in the previous section that I mentioned NFU alongside countervalue targeting, and counterforce targeting alongside first-strike strategies. This wasn’t arbitrary – NFU requires a countervalue strategy, and counterforce strategies work best when they are first-strike. The reasons for both of these are simple.

Under a NFU strategy, counterforce nuclear targeting is useless – the enemy has already launched the weapons that you would be trying to destroy or disable! The only targets remaining are the enemy’s major cities, leaving you with a massive pile of useless ordinance for the reasons outlined above. Even if the enemy had only launched a relatively limited counterforce strike, it’s very unlikely that they would have left you with the command/control infrastructure or intelligence/surveillance resources to land whatever warheads you still had on their remaining nuclear weapons. A counterforce targeting strategy, therefore, requires a first-use strategy – you may save a few small-medium sized cities by destroying reserve weapons stockpiles and other infrastructure after an initial launch, but for the most part, once the enemy launches its weapons, the game is up.

It’s probably clear at this point why I think NFU is not a policy that the United States should adopt. If paired with the current counterforce policy, we’ll be launching our weapons once it was far too late. If we switched to a countervalue policy, our arsenal will be nearly useless at deterring attack. Strategic considerations are not the only reason, however, to reject countervalue targeting.

===WORLD TARGETS IN MEGADEATHS===

For some, NFU isn’t about strategy at all. Rather, they believe that strategies that involve a first-strike are simply immoral. How could it be right for a country to attack another with little or no warning using the most powerful and terrifying weapons the world has ever seen? This argument has been around for a long time, and has become more popular alongside the growing movement to abolish nuclear weapons. In many ways, I’m sympathetic to this argument. First strikes obviously escalate crises and create a lot of risk for millions of people.

The problem, however, comes when considering that a No First Use pledge comes packaged with a countervalue targeting strategy for the reasons stated above. While I don’t think this terminology is as euphemistic as some others do, I think it’s worth being explicit about what that means: NFU REQUIRES the threat of indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of millions of innocent civilians. This is why I find it somewhat surprising that people on the left side of the political spectrum, such as Warren, are the primary cheerleaders for such a doctrine. How could people who believe that it is immoral and undemocratic to launch a surprise attack not believe that it is immoral and undemocratic to kill hundreds of millions of people? Perhaps they simply don’t understand the basics of nuclear strategy (reasonable for normal people, TERRIFYING for a presidential candidate), or maybe they are content with having an ineffective nuclear force if it means not compromising their principles (but if this was the case, why would they advocate for NFU rather than abolition?).

Anyone who has seen examples of the ghastly Cold War charts estimating civilian war dead, or has read accounts of Hiroshima, Chernobyl, or the firebombing of German and Japanese cities should be immediately horrified by the prospect of aiming our nuclear weapons at Chinese or Russian cities. If you care about having a moral foreign policy, it’s hard to see how leaving half a billion Chinese citizens burned alive, irradiated, crushed by debris, or simply starving wouldn’t cancel out all of the good your policies would do before or after such an action.

===CONCLUSION===

In terms of Warren’s endorsement of the policy, I’m conflicted. On one hand, I think NFU is one of the worst policies ever presented to the American people, and I’m fairly disturbed that a major presidential candidate has publicly declared it as her policy. On the other hand, I appreciate that Senator Warren has is at least discussing nuclear issues publicly. The issues pages for Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg contain no references to nuclear weapons whatsoever. Given the fact that the primary job of the President is commanding the nation’s military to keep Americans safe from attack, and that nuclear weapons are the most important aspect of that military, it’s disappointing to see most of the candidates ignore the issue entirely. Despite producing a Nuclear Posture Review that included many good policies in 2018, the Trump administration doesn’t appear willing or able to follow through with most of those policies. It seems that the best we can hope for in this election cycle is for the security situation in the West Pacific not to decline fast enough that nuclear strategy becomes relevant in the next 4-5 years.

Looking back at this blog’s first post, it should be clear by now that a NFU pledge violates at least goals #1-4 of the nuclear force (more to come about #5!). It violates #2 and #4 through strategic impotence, and #1 and #3 due to the fact that it involves threatening to kill a LOT of people. In fact, the much-feared “nuclear winter” that could destroy human civilization is only possible through countervalue targeting, since the cooling is caused by smoke and dust from firestorms in major cities hit by nuclear weapons.

I don’t mean to say that all counterforce first-strike strategies are perfect. The details of any strategy matter almost as much as its broad outlines. Nuclear weapons are the most dangerous devices ever created and should be treated with extreme caution regardless of how exactly you deploy them. This caution, however, must not come in the form of reflexive decisions based on what appears at first glance to be “less aggressive”. It must instead come as a set of policies crafted after a great deal of thought and considerations of goals, capabilities, known off-target effects, and uncertainty.