Democrats do not explicitly endorse a no-first use policy for nuclear weapons, according to the official 2020 platform that crystalizes their pitch to voters ahead of the November presidential election, but they come about as close as they could.
The party platform says Democrats “believe that the sole purpose of our nuclear arsenal should be to deter—and, if necessary, retaliate against—a nuclear attack, and we will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.”
The platform was officially approved last week at the Democratic National Convention, during which the party formally selected former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) as its nominees for president and vice president.
Biden, vice president for the whole Obama administration, has cultivated an image as a relative moderate who has accommodated his party’s leftward lean on social, labor, and race issues, but retained some centrist orthodoxies.
Those might, depending on how you reckon it, include this policy laid out in the platform, which makes no commitment to the declaratory no-first-use strategy advanced by some progressive Democrats. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who also competed for the 2020 presidential nomination, is one such party member. In a primary debate a year ago, Warren said a no-first-use policy “reduces the likelihood that someone miscalculates, someone misunderstands” U.S. intentions about nuclear war.
Generally speaking, no first use is when the highest level of national leadership explicitly proclaims that it will not attack with nuclear weapons until and unless someone else does. That would, on the honor system, rule out a nuclear first-strike to begin a conflict. The policy Democrats rolled out last week more resembles what some call “deterrence only” or “minimum deterrence.”
One version of “minimum deterrence,” advanced by scholar Bruce Blair, who died last month, calls for trimming the nuclear triad to an assured second-strike force of submarines. Those who favor maintaining and modernizing the arsenal as constructed, including some Democrats, say the existing triad essentially is the minimum force required for deterrence.
The Obama administration declined to commit to no first use, and Democrats have not fought too hard as a unit to push the issue to the fore, even after retaking control of the House in the 2018 midterms.
On the other hand, language in the 2020 Democratic platform strongly reflects policy that lawmakers from the party tried, and failed, to pass last year as part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act: that the U.S. can “maintain a strong, credible deterrent while reducing our overreliance and excessive expenditure on nuclear weapons.”
That hearkens back to the charge led last year by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) to slow deployment of next-generation Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the planned construction of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) facilities to cast new fissile cores for those weapons’ warheads. Last year, the chairman supported a study about extending the service life of the existing Minuteman III fleet, and focusing pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Smith said that if Minuteman III missiles could serve a while longer, the U.S. would not need as many new pits as soon as planned.
This year, Smith put less of a premium on fighting nuclear policy battles. In committee debate of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, the chair supported an amendment to cut nearly all this year’s funding for the GBSD, but he did not bring the bill to the committee with such a policy baked in. That could have led to a logjam in an election year. Now, the House and Senate have each approved competing versions of the must-pass military policy bill, which at deadline awaited reconciliation in a bicameral conference.
However, Smith could certainly revive the issue in future NDAAs developed by his committee — he’s in an easy re-election race, and House Democrats do not term-limit their committee leaders, as their GOP counterparts do. A Biden administration could spur Smith and his colleagues, or at least those of whom share his skepticism about the next-generation of silo-based, strike-anywhere missiles, to try again.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, did not release a platform for the 2020 election. The four-year agenda President Trump’s campaign released says that a “Great Cybersecurity Defense System and Missile Defense System” would figure into a possible second term, but nuke weapons got no mention.
GOP Former National Security Leaders Back Biden
Over 70 former national security officials, all Republicans, have endorsed Biden for president, calling Donald Trump “dangerously unfit to serve another term.”
The group includes several former members of the Trump administration, such as Miles Taylor, who served as the Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, and Elizabeth Neumann, who was DHS assistant secretary.
There are two signatories who served at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): former Administrator Linton Brooks and former Deputy Administrator William Tobey.
The statement was also signed by John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence, and William Webster, the former FBI and CIA director.
“While some of us hold policy positions that differ from those of Joe Biden and his party, the time to debate those policy differences will come later. For now, it is imperative that we stop Trump’s assault on our nation’s values and institutions and reinstate the moral foundations of our democracy,” the officials wrote in the statement.
