President Obama held two National Security Council meetings to consider the question. He personally believed that no American president would ever use nuclear weapons first. But some of his advisers, notably Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, persuaded him not to declare that fact as formal policy, for two reasons. First, some countries, including Russia, had biological weapons, which could be nearly as devastating as nukes if they used them. Yet because we no longer have bio-weapons, we couldn’t “retaliate in kind.” Threatening to retaliate with nuclear weapons might deter them from launching a bio attack—so why give up that option?
Second, Gates argued, our allies would have a fit. To a degree that most Americans don’t grasp, nuclear weapons remain a centerpiece of our guarantee that we will come to the defense of our allies if they’re under attack. This concept is called “extended deterrence” (the basic idea of deterrence—we’ll attack the enemy if the enemy attack us—extended to our allies) or the “nuclear umbrella” (we’ll use nukes to protect an ally just as we’d use them to protect ourselves). Sure enough, when word leaked that Obama was even considering a no-first-use policy, the Japanese foreign minister called the White House in a panic. When President Trump talked about folding up the umbrella, Japanese leaders seriously mulled building a nuclear arsenal of their own. In other words, far from encouraging others to forego nuclear weapons, a no-first-use policy might encourage some to dive in.
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