To the editors:
As a former nuclear planner, I would like to make two points in response to Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s review of The Doomsday Machine.
Dupuy is mistaken in asserting that a nation has only one goal in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, namely, to prevent others from using them. Look no further than the British and NATO strategist and former Permanent Secretary of the British Ministry of Defence, Sir Michael Quinlan. In his book Thinking about Nuclear Weapons, Quinlan explained the British and NATO rationale for a deterrent strategy that included nuclear weapons. As he wrote, it is a mistake to suppose that preventing nuclear weapon use is the sole aim. The goal is to deter all major war between advanced powers. Non-nuclear major war is not only appalling in itself; it is also the likeliest route to nuclear war. So do not start any kind of war against a nuclear armed power—this is the deterrent headline.
For that reason, no-first-use (NFU) declarations are built on sand. Even if such a declaration is signed in good faith during peacetime, no aggressor can reliably count on it being maintained in the passion, stress, and desperation that occurs during a major war between powerful states. And insofar as it lightens belief in the mind of the aggressor that there would be no first use by the victim, it makes major war more—not less—likely. That is why NATO, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France are right not to issue NFU nuclear assurances. It is a logical error to interpret the absence of an NFU declaration as an intent to be prepared to start a nuclear war.
