Gerson ‘10 (Michael S. Gerson is a research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, Fall 2010, “No First Use: The Next Step for U.S. Nuclear Policy,” International Security, Vol. 35, No. 2, p. 7-47)(Shiv)
A nuclear first strike is fraught with risk and uncertainty. Could a U.S. president, the only person with the power to authorize nuclear use and a political official concerned with re-election, his or her political party, and their historical legacy, ever be entirely confident that the mission would be a complete success? What if the strike failed to destroy all of the weapons, or what if weapons were hidden in unknown areas, and the remaining weapons were used in retaliation?A successful first strike would require near-perfect intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to detect, identify, and track all of the adversary’s nuclear forces; recent events surrounding U.S. assessments of Iraq’s suspected WMD capabilities forcefully demonstrate the challenges ofreliable, accurate, and unbiased information.59 Intelligence regarding where an adversary’s nuclear weapons are located and if the state is actually planning to attack could be wrong or incomplete, and an attempted first strike based on inaccurate or incomplete information could have far-reaching negative consequences. The United States could never be absolutely confident in its ability to fully neutralize the nuclear threat in a disarming first strike, and the possibility that [End Page 26] even just one or two nuclear weapons survive and are used in retaliation against the U.S. homeland or U.S. allies should be enough to induce extreme caution.60 The uncertainty of complete success, coupled with the possibility that an unsuccessful strike could bring costs that would outweigh the potential gains by way of nuclear retaliation, should cast serious doubt on first-strike options. Even if a surviving nuclear warhead were unable to reach the U.S. homeland, nuclear weapons could be used on an ally as a way of punishing the United States, and no president should want to risk being responsible for a nuclear detonation on another country in retaliation for U.S. actions.61 In the end, if an attempted disarming first strike leaves some of the adversary’s weapons intact, the United States may have started the nuclear war that it had hoped to prevent.
