Nuclear Deterrence as a Bluff

By Peter Huessy

Is it ethical to use a nuclear weapon in retaliation if the United States or her allies are first attacked by an enemy using a nuclear weapon?

Nuclear Ethics

Nearly four decades ago, Joseph Nye of Harvard wrote “Nuclear Ethics” to try and answer that question, putting together a checklist of ten key objectives the US should seek to achieve in putting together the nation’s deterrent strategy.

To update the debate, Scott Sagan of Stanford asked Nye to look at the issue again, and invited Joan Rohlfing of the Nuclear Threat Initiative to join him in so doing. According to Scott Sagan, nuclear weapons should not be used in retaliation if: (1) a conventional weapon would do the same job; (2) civilian damage would be widespread; and (3) it was not proportional.

Nye largely accepted these boundaries in his update, and he correctly emphasized that nuclear deterrence was necessary given little chance that global zero or the elimination of nuclear weapons could be achieved. He did support further deep reductions and arms control, while also noting that further limiting the role of nuclear weapons was the right path to pursue.

One could agree with all three of these criteria, but there is a danger that our adversaries will see some proposed nuclear deterrent restrictions or guidelines as the US coming close to adopting a bluff strategy with the result that the potential use of nuclear weapons or the threat of such use will actually become more likely.

While any exchange of nuclear weapons would be ghastly, there is a serious problem to conclude as Joan Rohlfing does that there is no deterrent role for nuclear weapons use at all. Rohlfing assumes the indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons makes any use immoral, and that any exchange would most likely lead to catastrophic global nuclear war, nuclear winter and the loss of billions of lives.

The same argument was used by the late