Weapons of Last Resort
Quotes of the week: “You use a small one, then you go to a bigger one. I think nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons and we need to draw the line there.” — George Shultz “I don’t think there’s any such…
Tag: no first use
No First Use
Quotes of the week: “We are come to make a choice between the quick and the dead.” — Bernard Baruch before the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, June 14, 1946. “To be quick in pulling the nuclear trigger is to…
Year-End Assessment
Quote of the week: “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.” — George Bernard Shaw It has been a bad year. Any year is a bad year when Mar-a-Lago…
No First Use
Quote of the week: “A ‘no first use’ policy would be the end of flexible response and thus of the very credibility of the Western strategy of deterrence.” – Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, speech at Georgetown University’s Center for…
The Counterforce Compulsion in South Asia
Quotes of the week: “There has been literally no chance at all that any sane political authority… would consciously choose to start a nuclear war. This proposition is true for the past, the present, and the foreseeable future. For sane…
Not Just Yet for No First Use
The United States is not going to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. Allies who believe otherwise are attached to a fiction and a psychological crutch. But these allies have been badly spooked, first by Vladimir Putin and now by…
Alliances and No First Use
The Bill Clinton Administration made a questionable call to expand NATO after the Cold War ended. The George W. Bush Administration made matters far worse by expanding NATO up to Russia’s border in the Baltics and pushing club membership further…
Upending the Stalemate between India and Pakistan
Trend lines in the subcontinent are poor and will not improve until there is substantive dialogue between India and Pakistan. Hopes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would pull a “Nixon goes to China” maneuver with Pakistan have been dashed, at…
Seventy Years Without an A-Bombing
As numbers-based arms control wanes, norms become even more important. Norms can be clarified in Codes of Conduct or established by customary practice. The most important norm in our field is the non-use of nuclear weapons in combat. Few expected…
