Make No First Use of Nuclear Weapons : The First Step Towards Global Nuclear Disarmament

This paper discusses making No First Use (NFU) of nuclear weapons enshrined in the Indian Nuclear Doctrine as a first step towards nuclear disarmament. The proposal derives its credence from the efforts of the US President Barrack Obama to place nuclear disarmament as an important policy of his administration. Incidentally, the concept of NFU originated in the US, but it is China that put it into practice first, in October 1964 after its first nuclear test. Of the many advantages of the policy of NFU, it is more democratic in contrast to the First Use (FU) policy practiced by the US. Under the policy of FU, per force, nuclear weapons have to be placed with the armed forces for instant use. But in NFU, since nuclear weapons are used only for a second strike, the weapons could be held by a different agency other than the armed forces. India is the only country that has made, “Global, verifiable and nondiscriminatory nuclear disarmament” as a national security objective by including it in the nuclear doctrine. Hence, the step has to be taken for an international treaty amongst the known nuclear powers and threshold states on NFU of nuclear weapons. Noble Peace Laureate, Sir Joseph Rotblat had called for a treaty among Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) that commits them never to be the first to use nuclear weapons. Rotblat rightly thought NFU “would open the way to the gradual, mutual reductions of nuclear arsenals, down to zero.” If each NWS commits not to use nuclear weapon as a weapon of first strike, there shall be no occasion to use them at all. India had introduced such a proposal for consideration in the UN Conference on Disarmament in February 2008. A multilateral agreement under UN should bind the nations to a greater extent to follow the spirit of the treaty