The concept is primarily invoked in reference to nuclear mutually assured destruction but has also been applied to chemical and biological warfare, as is the case of the official WMD policy of India.
Both NATO and a number of its member states have repeatedly rejected calls for adopting a NFU policy,[3] as during the lifetime of the Soviet Union a pre-emptive nuclear strike was commonly argued as a key option to afford NATO a credible nuclear deterrent, compensating for the overwhelming conventional weapon superiority enjoyed by the Soviet Army in Eurasia.
North Korea has publicly pledged to refrain from a preemptive nuclear strike, while threatening retaliation up to and including WMD against conventional aggression.
In August 1999, the Indian government released a draft of the doctrine[16] which asserts that nuclear weapons are solely for deterrence and that India will pursue a policy of "retaliation only".
[20] That was in response to reports that Pakistan had developed a tactical battlefield nuclear weapon in an attempt to supposedly nullify an Indian "no first use" retaliatory doctrine.
Historically, NATO military strategy, taking into account the numerical superiority of Warsaw Pact conventional forces, assumed that tactical nuclear weapons would have to be used to defeat a Soviet invasion.
"[30] In its final years, the Soviet Union adopted a formal no-first-use in 1982 when Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko read out at the United Nations a pledge by General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev not to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
[31] However, this pledge was not taken seriously, and later leaked Soviet Armed Forces documents confirmed that the military had plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike and considered launching one during the Able Archer 83 crisis.
[32][45] In April 2017 Defence Secretary Michael Fallon confirmed that the UK would use nuclear weapons in a "pre-emptive initial strike" in "the most extreme circumstances".
[54][5] During the 2017–2018 North Korea crisis, there were efforts to either require congressional approval for a pre-emptive nuclear strike[55] or to ban it altogether and impose an NFU policy.
[56] The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Bob Corker held its first meeting on the President's authority to use nuclear weapons in 41 years.
[57] Since 2017, Ted Lieu, Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, and Adam Smith all introduced bills to limit the President's ability to order a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
[74]: 6, 23–24 Sparking debate with their 1982 Foreign Affairs article, former US national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, US diplomat George F. Kennan, former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and US lead negotiator for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Gerard C. Smith challenged the US and the Atlantic Alliance "to consider the possibilities, the requirements, the difficulties, and the advantages of a policy of no-first-use" and urged that citizens, too, consider these policy questions.
The authors believed that fully exploring NFU as a strategy and policy would reveal greater advantages than costs and "help the peoples and governments of the Alliance to find the political will to move in this direction".
They also maintained that an NFU posture and policy "could help to open the path toward serious reduction of nuclear armaments on both sides", cautioning that "[a]s long as the weapons themselves exist, the possibility of use will remain.
"[76]: 32, 35, 37, 39–40 In the context of Japan's reliance on US extended deterrence, former Japanese diplomat, director of JIIA's Center for the Promotion of Disarmament and Nonproliferation (2008–2014) and commissioner of the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (2014–2017) Nobuyasu Abe in 2018 called for re-examining the role of nuclear weapons alongside the non-nuclear military situation in the regional security environment to bridge the "great divide between idealists and realists" on adopting a no-first-use policy.
[79] In its November 2017 policy brief, the European Council on Foreign Relations concluded that North Korea's posture is one of "nuclear pre-emption" and its government "concerned that a first strike could destroy it"; in contrast, China pursues "what Beijing calls 'nuclear counterstrike campaigns'", having declared its NFU doctrine out of the belief "that neither its government nor its nuclear arsenal could be eliminated in a first strike by a hostile power".
"[83] Former chair of the Bundestag Subcommittee on Disarmament and Arms Control Uta Zapf in 2021 characterized NFU policy adoption as "a first step and a door-opener for an urgently needed dialog on the role of NW in military doctrines and strategies".
[84] Dominic Tierney, political science professor at Swarthmore College and author of The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, in 2016 wrote: "Champions and critics of no-first-use often cast it as a principled policy and a revolutionary step, for good or for ill.
[85] In her 2018 view of narratives surrounding the TPNW, Heather Williams of King's College London acknowledged the importance of deterrence as a security tool to many states and proposed a "bridge-building framework" involving supporters and opponents finding common ground and working together, for example, on nuclear risk reduction.
[87]: 10, 74, 154 The following year, the India-based Observer Research Foundation co-authored an opinion piece with Manpreet Sethi, mentioning the reintroduction of the No First Use Act in both chambers of the US Congress as "hope rekindled" and noting that, given the reality of countries unwilling to give up their nuclear weapons, an NFU "allows nations to maintain a notional sense of security from their nuclear weapons, but significantly reduces possibilities of use".