Abstract
There is a growing sense on both sides of the Atlantic that a greater effort must be made to improve the non-nuclear military capabilities of NATO, and raise the threshold to nuclear war. Disagreement has arisen, however, over the extent to which NATO can move in the direction of increased reliance on conventional forces, and away from threatening the first use of nuclear weapons to deter a Warsaw Pact non-nuclear attack on Western Europe. The ‘No First Use’ of nuclear weapons proposal advanced by McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard Smith in the Spring 1982 issue of Foreign Affairs,1 for example, has received the unqualified support of only a relatively small minority of observers both in the United States and in Western Europe, and is opposed officially by NATO governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Notes
Gert Krell, Thomas Risse-Kappen, and Hans-Joachim Schmidt, ‘The No-First-Use Question in Germany’, in John D. Steinbruner and Leon V. Sigal, editors, NATO and the No-First-Use Question, Washington, The Brookings Institution, 1983, p. 167.
Phillip A. Peterson and John G. Hines, ‘The Conventional Offensive in Soviet Theater Nuclear Strategy’, Orbis, 27:3 (Fall 1983 ), p. 725.
Christopher N. Donnelly, ‘Soviet Operational Concepts in the 1980s’, in The European Security Study, Strengthening Conventional Deterrence in Europe: Proposals for the 1980s (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 115.
See also Joseph D. Douglass, The Soviet Theater Nuclear Offensive (Washington: USGPO, Studies in Communist Affairs, vol. 1, 1976 ), p. 5.
Earl C. Ravenal, ‘Counterforce and the Alliance: The Ultimate Connection’, International Security, 6:4 (Spring 1982), p. 35–6.
Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983 ), p. 174.
Earl C. Ravenal, ‘No First Use: A View From the United States’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 39:4 (April 1983), p. 14. It would be necessary to shield Western Europe as well as the United States from Soviet retaliation in order to prevent the Soviets from using Western Europe as a hostage to deter a US strategic attack.
Paul Bracken, ‘The NATO Defense Problem’, Orbis, 27:1 (Spring 1983), pp. 90–3; and Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces pp. 160–3.
John Marshall Lee, ‘The Use of Nuclear Weapons’, monograph presented at the conference on ‘Prospects for Peacemaking’, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, November 1984, pp. 30–31. See also the arguments presented in Lee’s contribution to the present volume.
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© 1988 P. Terrence Hopmann and Frank Barnaby
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Harris, J.B. (1988). From Flexible Response to No Early First Use. In: Hopmann, P.T., Barnaby, F. (eds) Rethinking the Nuclear Weapons Dilemma in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09181-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09181-2_7
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