On U.S. Nuclear Doctrine: a Preliminary Report

The U.S. has never declared a policy of no first-use of nuclear weapons. Such a policy was explicitly rejected in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review of the Trump Administration and does not appear in the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review of the Biden Administration, even though President Joe Biden at one time promised that he would have that stated explicitly in U.S. nuclear doctrine. In fact, as MIT Professor Ted Postol and others have shown over years, the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal is actually configured as a first strike force to be used, among other ways, as part of the “integrated deterrence” policy promulgated by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The surfacing of the Ohio class ballistic missile submarine USS West Virginia in the Arabian Sea last October was taken in Moscow as a message that, indeed, the U.S. believes that it has the capability to target Russia’s nuclear potential in a first strike.