Politics
Time to Adopt a ‘No First Use’ Nuclear Policy
The prevailing nuclear orthodoxy at Washington is dangerous and destabilizing.
Days prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, US Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded in his diary a recollection of a meeting in the Oval Office during which President Franklin Roosevelt speculated that the Japanese were likely to attack soon, and “the question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” It was, wrote Stimson, “a difficult proposition.”
The attack came on December 7, 1941 and set in train a series of events that would culminate 79 years ago this week, with the decision by President Harry Truman, acting against the advice of his top military advisers, to decimate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs.
According to contemporaneous reports, Truman was “jubilant” after destroying Hiroshima, boasting, “We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won.”
“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor,” said Truman. “They have been repaid many fold.”
During the 40-year Cold War with the Soviet Union that followed, U.S. policy was generally to steer clear of nuclear confrontations—and was it not uncommon for members of the Washington establishment to publicly express their misgivings over U.S. nuclear policy.
Though largely forgotten today, as the U.S. entered the final decade of the first Cold War, McGeorge Bundy, the former national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, formed (perhaps as an act of penance) a “Gang of Four” with the former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the scholar-diplomat George F. Kennan, and the arms-control negotiator Gerard C. Smith to push for a change in America’s nuclear policy.
In 1982, the Gang of Four published an article in the establishment organ Foreign Affairs calling on the U.S. to scrap plans to deploy nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe.
“It is time to recognize that no one has ever succeeded in advancing any persuasive reason to believe that any use of nuclear weapons, even on the smallest scale, could reliably be expected to remain limite …