The Issue of No First UseAuthor(s): Michael HowardSource: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Fall, 1982), pp. 211-212Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20041359 .

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COMMENT AND

CORRESPONDENCE

THE ISSUE OF NO FIRST USE

To the Editor: The furor aroused by the article by McGeorge Bundy and his three

colleagues in your Spring 1982 issue, including the disclaimer by the Secretary of State, the hostile comments in European journals, and finally the riposte by

Karl Kaiser and his colleagues in your Summer issue, has provided depressing evidence of the extent to which a strategic doctrine whose military credibility has been steadily decreasing still remains a political orthodoxy to be ques tioned at one's peril.

The original American "Gang of Four" put forward a view which to many of us has been increasingly self-evident. A guarantee by the United States to

its partners in Western Europe that it would be prepared to counter a Soviet attack on Western Europe on any level by initiating the use of nuclear

weapons may have been effective when the West enjoyed a virtual nuclear

monopoly, but it looks very different when the Soviet Union has attained nuclear parity. For either side to initiate the use of battlefield nuclear weapons would now make a desert of Central Europe. To initiate an exchange of Intermediate Nuclear Forces would lay Europe waste from the Atlantic to the

Urals. To initiate a strategic exchange, whatever the targeting doctrine used and however careful the provision for communication, command and control,

would be to risk global holocaust. It is not simply a question of whether the President of the United States would or should be willing, in an emergency, to do such things. It is more profoundly a question of whether his proclaimed readiness to do so is any longer credible to an adversary, or can be made so by any new deployment of forces. And there are a growing number of people, both in Western Europe and in the United States, who see little advantage in

being defended by such means.

This, I take it, was the point of the Gang of Four's article: that a more credible defensive strategy must be developed, and that this can be done only by concentrating on developing our conventional capabilities. However, the authors went further to recommend (subject to careful study and the achieve

ment of adequate conventional capabilities) a categorical policy that NATO should under no circumstances initiate the use of nuclear weapons, and it was this

aspect of their proposal that so disturbed Mr. Kaiser and his colleagues. The fears voiced by these latter were real and justified ones. It would indeed be

deeply disturbing to the solidarity of the Alliance, and enfeebling to the

security of Western Europe, if the Soviet Union ever came to believe that it could attack us without thereby incurring an appalling risk of triggering off a nuclear exchange. A strategy that totally foreswore the first use of nuclear

weapons under any circumstances whatever, and a declaratory policy deriving from it, would indeed be profoundly destabilizing. But a strategy dependent on first use is no less destabilizing, both because of its doubtful credibility, and because of its growing unacceptability to the very peoples it is intended to defend.

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212 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The improvement of conventional forces in Europe is in fact necessary, not to replace the American nuclear guarantee, but to make it more credible and to supplement it.

In the first place the Soviet leadership must understand what an anguished and prolonged process would have to be gone through before any American President could bring himself to authorize a nuclear response to a conventional attack on any territory outside U.S. soil. In consequence the temptation to secure a "quick fix" with conventional forces before any such decision could be taken might one day appear very great. To eliminate such a possibility there is no alternative to adequate conventional defenses en place?the best deterrent to any kind of attack.

In the second place the Soviet leadership has to be brought to see that, even

if there were no escalation to nuclear war, their armed forces would suffer so severely at the hands of the defenders of Western Europe that the cost of any military achievements would be unacceptably high in terms, not only of blood and

treasure, but of the cohesion of their Empire. The alternative to a strategy based on nuclear first use is not, as the German authors seem to think, one

based on a capacity to defeat the Soviet Union in a full-scale conflict with

conventional forces. Their criticisms of the American proposals here are

entirely beside the point. It would not be necessary, as they suggest, to turn

Western Europe into an armed camp. Clausewitz pointed out that an aggressor can be deterred not only by the prospect of defeat but by "the improbability of victory" and by "its unacceptable cost." That the imposition of such

"unacceptable cost" on any Soviet conventional attack is not so far beyond the resources of the Alliance as Mr. Kaiser and his colleagues appear to believe

is made clear by the authoritative article by General Bernard Rogers that

appears in the same issue as their own.

The German article rightly points out that our object must be to deter any war in Europe, conventional as well as nuclear. But a strategy with no other recourse than an early use of nuclear weapons provides, with its dubious

credibility, little deterrence against either. It is therefore a matter of some

relief that the Germans conclude their article by agreeing with the main

thrust of their American counterparts, that "an energetic attempt to reduce

the dependence on an early first use should be undertaken." It is utterly fallacious to suggest that any attempt to redress the conventional balance in

Europe would erode effective nuclear deterrence and undermine the credibility of the Alliance. In an age of nuclear parity strong conventional defenses are

a necessary condition of both.

Michael Howard

Oxford University

FUTURE CLIMATE

To the Editor: William W. Kellogg and Robert Schware have done an outstanding job in

your Summer 1982 issue, presenting a difficult and controversial scientific

problem which is of far-reaching importance. They have, perhaps for the first

time, developed some of the economic and political consequences of the global

warming many expect as a result of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide

which derives from the massive burning of fossil fuels.

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