soreff (12/13/82)
Does anyone know if the USSR has made a pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons? In an article in the January 1983 issue of Harper's in an article entitled "If Orwell Were Alive Today" Norman Podhoretz claims: "But I think he [George Orwell] would also have opposed such measures as the nuclear freeze and a unilateral Western pledge of no-first-use of nuclear weapons." . I seem to recall that the USSR has already made some sort of no-first-use pledge. Does anyone recall if they have or not? Presumably, if they have, then the Western nations could not make a unilateral pledge. They could only make the existing pledge bilateral. Of course, in the event of a war, it is unlikely that either set of rulers would honor its pledge, but I'm still curious as to whether there are any no-first-use pledges outstanding. -Jeffrey Soreff
ka (12/13/82)
During the U. N. Disarmament Conference in June, Bresznev pledged that the USSR would not be the first to use nuclear weapons and urged Reagan to make a similar pledge. Reagan refused. Kenneth Almquist (spanky!ka)
henry (12/17/82)
The US *CANNOT* pledge no first use of nuclear weapons, because this would amount to abandoning its NATO allies. First use of tactical nuclear weapons has been a keystone of NATO policy for many years, as a way of maintaining a credible defence despite being badly outnumbered in conventional forces. Whether or not this policy is realistic -- if a real war started out conventional there would be enormous pressure to keep it that way -- is irrelevant: the issues are political, not military. European NATO governments see the threat of first-use tactical nuclear weapons as a major counterweight to the massive, all-too-visible Warsaw Pact forces sitting just across the border from them. A no-first-use pledge by the US would alienate Western Europe much more severely than the recent pipeline controversy did. Now, I personally think that at least 95% of the existing tactical nuclear weapons should be scrapped, not for moral reasons but simply because they are useless. There is no plausible circumstance in which they would be used. Assuming the Soviets kept a war non-nuclear, nothing short of total disaster for NATO would cause the use of nuclear weapons to be considered seriously. The few possible combinations of events where tactical nuclear weapons would be really useful could be taken care of as a secondary role for some of the strategic nuclear systems. PLEASE NOTE, however, that I am not suggesting that this scrapping be done suddenly or unilaterally. Western Europe would have to approve, and that would take a great deal of careful talking. They're clearly going to have mixed feelings at first: they've never been happy about nuclear warfare on their home turf, but it will take a while for them to get used to the idea that their defence will not be seriously hurt. They've lived too long with this irrational contradiction to resolve it quickly. And some of the resolution may require real improvements in the conventional forces of the West. Why such concern about commitments to Europe? Well, apart from the non-trivial benefits of having allies, the equally non-trivial win of keeping countries out of the opposing camp, and such minor points as keeping one's promises (the US does not seem to put much value on this of late...), there is a much more important reason. If Europe feels that it is threatened by the Soviet Union and is without big powerful friends, what will it do? Right: nuclear weapons. It is in everybody's interests to keep the number of nuclear powers down. The more complicated the situation gets, and the more states there are that control nuclear weapons, the greater the danger. There is one specific case that is worth considerable worry. West Germany is looking right across a border at Soviet troops. West Germany is unquestionably capable of assembling nuclear weapons on very short notice: they have the materials and the knowledge. It is not an accident that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was practically custom-written for West Germany. Nor is it an accident that in the event of nuclear war, German planes flown by German pilots would carry nuclear bombs from German storage facilities to targets chosen by German planners... but the bombs are owned by the US, and cannot be armed without US cooperation. Why all this concern with arranging for the West Germans to feel secure without actually having their own nuclear weapons? Look at the Soviet viewpoint. When they look at Germany, they see the country that has invaded them twice this century, with particularly bloody consequences the second time. The country whose troops were stopped at the very gates of Moscow last time. (One of the major tenets of Soviet defence policy is that this sort of near-catastrophe is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN AGAIN.) They see the country that got smashed flat at the end of World War II, and has rebuilt itself strikingly. The country that is still divided by the Iron Curtain, and doesn't like it much. The country where neo-Nazi, real Nazi, and other ultra-right-wing Communist-hating factions are still a serious factor in politics... Germany, with nuclear weapons? Granted that the Soviets do tend to be paranoid, this really doesn't add up to a very safe-and-serene picture from their viewpoint. In fact, they would class it as a disaster waiting to happen. Whether or not this fear is really justified, this is the way they feel. A nuclear-armed Germany is one of the very few situations that they would consider grave enough to DEMAND taking the terrible risks of an immediate invasion of Western Europe. And if that happens, we all have to cross our fingers and pray that the nuclear lid stays on... To sum up: yes, Virginia, the defence of Western Europe is important to all of us. Not because of a moral principle, not because Western Europe per se is important, not because it's our "first line of defence" (although those are all important considerations), but because the consequences of Western Europe perceiving its defences as inadequate could kill us all. And this is why there can be no "no first use" pledge on our side until the Europeans are quite sure that it will not leave them vulnerable. Henry Spencer U of Toronto