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Comment by jwtadvice | Hacker News Reader

The US continues, today, to be the only first-strike nuclear nation threatening to (as an explicit policy) destroy civilian population centers in a host of competitor countries as a coercive tactic and if and when it serves US national interest.

The further continuation of this longstanding policy, which is in effect today, is a matter of debate - though there has not yet been a strong enough coalition of opinion to withdraw this doctrine.

There were several nuclear strike target lists leaked from the past several administrations and they all say the same thing: capitols and population centers of compeditors, strike first in scenarios where not striking could put the US at a serious competitive disadvantage, use the threat of a strike and the deterrent of weapons of mass destruction as a coercive measure in the toolbox of statecraft.

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Yes, because we've totally just been nuking or threatening to nuke anyone who looked at us cross-eyed for the last few decades... /s Your nomenclature is a bit hyperbolic.

"competitor countries" in the nuclear context mean "countries that threaten us with nuclear war", "coercive tactic" and "when it serves the US national interest" correspondingly means "threatening nuclear war to dissuade existential threats", and "competitive disadvantage" means "being on the losing side of a nuclear exchange".

We can debate what the official policy should or should not say but please don't take the terms out of context to make them sound scary, it really detracts from your argument.

First. Strawman. Not helpful.

I actually lifted the nomenclature directly from National Security experts. I did not invent or distort any of the nomenclature.

Further, it is a very accurate representation of the terminology and nomenclature.

The point I hope to drive home is that 70 years later the same "chilling" (title word, not mine) is in effect.

> "competitor countries" in the nuclear context mean "countries that threaten us with nuclear war"

No. If you look at the list of target nations they include non-nuclear countries (Syria, Iran, etc).

> "coercive tactic" and "when it serves the US national interest" correspondingly means "threatening nuclear war to dissuade existential threats"

Mostly wrong. An existential threat could be an economic or political existential threat, or it could be conventional. And it can also be used (IS used) for non-existential coercion: say defending an ally.

> "competitive disadvantage" means "being on the losing side of a nuclear exchange".

No. It means facing a large risk of losing in a conflict of some kind for which there is a large interest in the US of winning. This does not apply only to nuclear exchange and indeed National Security practitioners are quite keen to discuss "cross-domain" warfare (lawfare, sanctions, political entanglement, etc).

> We can debate what the official policy should or should not say but please don't take the terms out of context to make them sound scary

You've taken the terms out of context.

I hope I didn't make them sound scary. I mean, reality is a bit scary some times but I wrote that as quite matter-of-fact.

>If you look at the list of target nations they include non-nuclear countries (Syria, Iran, etc).

US policy is to respond to non-nuclear WMD attacks with nuclear weapons, and it's a good policy. Because otherwise we would need to develop and maintain large stocks of chemical and biological weapons if the policy was to respond to WMD with the same kind of WMD.

That is not the US policy.

The US policy is to use the threat of overwhelming force, nuclear and non-nuclear, for leverage in interstate conflict whatever that conflict may be and whether or not that conflict is a threat to the United States or its persons or just the outcomes it is interested in.

It's possible that nuclear forces could be used in a scenario like you suggest, but to round that up to policy is inaccurate and it is misleading.

> US policy is to respond to non-nuclear WMD attacks with nuclear weapons

Source? Every policy statement I've seen neither requires a WMD attack to trigger a nuclear response nor commits to respond to WMD attacks with a nuclear response, and in the occasions when US forces have been targeted by non-conventional weapons it has not responded with nuclear weapons.

It seems to me US policy is to generally not to rule in or out the use of nuclear weapons in advance, and to use them if and when it feels the specific circumstances warrant it.

(Though the most recent Nuclear Posture Review [0] both adopted a goal of reaching a state where the use could adopt a “sole use” policy, and explicitly stated a policy of of neither using nor threatening to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-armed states that are parties to an in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the former of which would completely and the latter of which does generally conflict with use of nuclear weapons as a general deterrent for non-nuclear WMD attacks.)

[0] https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/defenseReviews/NP... see page ix

https://www.armscontrol.org/print/1184

>The strategy suggests that the United States might retaliate with a nuclear strike in response to a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack on the United States, U.S. troops, or friends and allies. “The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force—including through resort to all our options—to the use of WMD,” the strategy warns. Previous administrations have made similar statements at various times despite a long-standing policy not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states unless they attack the United States in alliance with a nuclear-weapon state.

>Neither the threat to act pre-emptively nor to possibly react to a chemical or biological attack with nuclear weapons are novel, but the Bush administration has more openly and frequently discussed these options than its predecessors and has now set them out as official policy.

Sure, that's not the same thing as saying "we will definitely nuke you if you gas us", but you're never going to see something like that in writing because it removes the option of not doing it.

Right, you've just reaffirmed what the parent poster said.

The US reserves the right to use it's nuclear weapons in this way. But in no way is this the unique, most important, or most manifest reservation of nuclear force. Nor is the US bound by policy that it will respond to WMDs this way.

This passage says "We don't rule it out."

It's not accurate to round that up to a representation of policy. The parent responded to this characterization quite well.

No straw man, you said "The US continues, today, to be the only first-strike nuclear nation threatening to (as an explicit policy) destroy civilian population centers in a host of competitor countries as a coercive tactic and if and when it serves US national interest."

You're using present tense with incredibly broad terminology, same for the rest of your post. It's so broad that it's either meaningless or you really think we're currently, actively holding a nuclear gun to everyone's head over every little thing.

If so it doesn't seem to be getting us very far. China should be far more compliant. /s

Now that you've clarified, you're clearly speculating about what the US "might" or "could" do given the current official policy that's on the books. Which is fine, but it's almost purely speculative and counters your previous point.

Do you have any historical examples of the US actively strong-armining an opponent with the threat of a first strike over a political existential threat? How about an economic existential threat? How about cross-domain warfare with the threat of a nuclear first strike? I have no doubt the plans were drawn up by some department of the government, particularly during the early Cold War. But to my knowledge they have never even come close to mplementation outside of the Korean War and Cuban Missile Crisis.

As for conventional existential threats, Syria and Iran, I would hope that if someone managed to mount a conventional D-Day style invasion of the coasts we would nuke them. And I don't see Syria and Iran anywhere on the list (not that I have time for an exhaustive search, page number?), but it makes sense that Syria and Iran be included given prevailing attitudes about Soviet influence in the 1950s. A nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union would have been total war, including those perceived, rightly or wrongfully, to be their client states.

"Yes, because we've totally just been nuking or threatening to nuke anyone who looked at us cross-eyed for the last few decades... /s Your nomenclature is a bit hyperbolic."

Is quite clearly a strawman.

> You're using present tense with incredibly broad terminology

> you really think we're currently, actively holding a nuclear gun to everyone's head over every little thing.

Nope. Though perhaps I haven't made myself clear. Here it is more clearly: The US judiciously uses the threat of nuclear attacks on civilian population centers to achieve what it wants. This is one lever of power which the US pulls to achieve coercion and it uses its other levers much more frequently. It is the only nation that uses first-strike nuclear threats for coercive leverage in this way.

Is that more clear?

> Do you have any historical examples of the US actively strong-armining an opponent with the threat of a first strike over a political existential threat?

Soviet Union (before they developed their own nuclear weapons, for instance), China (over Taiwan), DPRK (over the peninsula in proxy war aftermath), Iraq (in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq). Off the top of my head. But of course it has used the leverage in many other cases, and for its extended nuclear deterrence.

> How about an economic existential threat?

Hasn't happened, though NatSec considers economic competitiveness a core principle of National Security. The Cold War in fact was economic competition as well as political. So maybe we could use that.

> How about cross-domain warfare with the threat of a nuclear first strike?

We've got a nice list going on now don't we?

> But to my knowledge they have never even come close to mplementation outside of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Did you miss the entire nuclear umbrella concept - a key US policy for the last 70 years? Wouldn't you have to admit that the deployment of a nuclear threat in the face of non-nuclear challenge (above) is cross-domain. So I think we've satisfied this one.

I don't really know how to reply to the rambling at the end of the post. It wasn't really a question.

Well now we're getting somewhere. Specifics are much nicer. Maybe you were using some rarified academic terminology where terms like "coercion" "competitor countries" and "serves the US National Interest" have much more specific meanings than standard English would imply, although I'm not sure how specific you could get with such broad terms even in an academic setting. If anything I'd expect more acronyms and nitpicky details.

But in any case, we've clearly never followed through on the threat of a nuclear first strike, and according to this page we haven't issued one since the 1950s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_blackmail

I was especially shocked to hear we threatened Iraq with one in the run up to 2003... I just googled around to be sure and while there was tons of rhetoric about "pre-emptive strikes" it was always in a conventional context.

Where are you getting your information exactly?

Also that "rambling" was me poiting out scenarios where a nuclear reponse would be reasonable under your terminology, or at least understandable when taken in context. It wasn't meant as a question.

Is official policy important? If China or Russia or whoever decide one day that they need to make a first strike against population centers, it's not like they're going to say, "oh, I wish we could, but we can't, it's against policy."

Yes official policy is important. This is for several reasons:

1. Official policy communicates expectations. Others derive their behavior from, in large part, the official positions of others.

2. Official policy provides a mechanism of commitment. It is difficult to withdraw from or engage in something that is against public and officially stated policy (in both domestic politics and international relations).

3. Official policy is a mechanism to inform and constrain other national choices. It is difficult to have multiple official policies that clearly contradict, such as having an official policy of dismantling all nuclear arsenals at the same time as having an official policy to provide a nuclear umbrella over protectorates. When administrations transition and when new staff come into security planning, their choices on other policies are constrained by existing policies.

4. Cultivating an expectation that official policy is a good predictor of behavior provides a strong signaling function to other states, and for the building of statecraft. Countries that have no credibility often have none because of their misalignment of actions and official policy.

But yes, nations do sometimes decide to change policy or act against their policy. In the case of Russia or China as you've written in the above comment it is very highly unlikely for a large number of reasons. But it remains possible in slim margins, sure, and could be fun to speculate about.

But what's the problem with this doctrine from the perspective of a nation-state actor? I'm being purposely obtuse with the question but I think to some extent the doctrine does make sense. It's too late to convince the world that having nuclear weapons isn't diplomatically advantageous, that cat has been out of the box for awhile. Any risks associated with having nuclear weapons tend to occur prior to their successful development which creates the risk/reward dynamic.

In realist terms, other nations aren't really an American problem until they detract from American interests both material and diplomatic. I'm focusing on the US because that's where your criticism was centered but I'm of the opinion that this philosophy could be applied to any given nation albeit with altered strategic considerations.

It's interesting. I did not mean this comment as criticism (as you suggest).

I'm merely accounting that the point of the article ("in the 1950s, the US policies on use of nuclear forces was startling - to our sensibilities - in how it exercised them for power in pragmatic, utilitarian ways") equally applies today.

The book "Command and Control" spends a good amount of time on this plan.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_G.g...

> The US continues, today, to be the only first-strike nuclear nation threatening to (as an explicit policy) destroy civilian population centers in a host of competitor countries as a coercive tactic and if and when it serves US national interest.

Doesn't the Geneva convention disallow terrorism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention#Colle...

Does this mean that if anyone actually carried out an order like this they could be prosecuted for war crimes?

Is it illegal to make or disseminate plans for war crimes if one hasn't carried them out yet?

International law does not apply to the US. When the Hague found the United States guilty of attacking and violating Nicaragua's sovereignty, the US simply refused to comply with the ruling and the issue was subsequently dropped.[1]

> Is it illegal to make or disseminate plans for war crimes if one hasn't carried them out yet?

Apparently not.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_in_Gu...

The Geneva Convention is only useful so long as the people with the big guns choose to uphold it. In many respects, it is a relic of early-modern limited war doctrines and archaic aristocratic sensibilities.

The most recent nuclear policy I can find for the US rules this out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Posture_Review

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