The Government has reaffirmed that the United Kingdom does not operate a formal “no-first-use” nuclear policy, instead maintaining a position of deliberate ambiguity intended to support deterrence.
Speaking in the House of Lords, Lord Coaker said the Government continues to hold to a long-standing approach on nuclear use, responding to concerns raised by Plaid Cymru peer Lord Wigley about the morality of first use. Lord Wigley asked whether it remained government policy to reserve the option of using nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack, describing such a stance as morally unacceptable. In reply, Lord Coaker did not set out any change to policy, instead underlining continuity with previous governments.
“Of course, the Government’s position is to maintain the position that we have had over many decades,” he told peers. He added that the existence of the nuclear deterrent was linked to the protection of democratic freedoms, noting that open debate itself was enabled by national security. Successive governments have stated that the UK would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in “extreme circumstances of self-defence”, including the defence of NATO allies, but have deliberately avoided ruling out first use.
This policy of ambiguity is intended to strengthen deterrence by ensuring that potential adversaries cannot assume any form of attack would remain below the nuclear threshold. The UK’s position is aligned with NATO’s wider deterrence posture, which similarly avoids adopting a no-first-use commitment.
According to the House of Commons Library, the absence of an NFU pledge is seen by the UK and its allies as a means of preventing hostile states from calculating that they could launch large-scale conventional, chemical or biological attacks without risking a nuclear response. The Government has consistently argued that clarity about restraint, combined with ambiguity about thresholds, remains central to the credibility of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and to NATO’s collective defence strategy.
We’d have to be MAD to use them.
Given the vagaries of NATO’s main nuclear power we may need a major overhaul of our own nuclear policy and delivery systems. We should consider a significant increase of up to 500 warheads as well as an expansion of deliver systems including air launched cruise missiles and potentially road mobile IRBM’s.
The UK and France using their capability and potentially expanding nuclear sharing to Poland and Sweden may be the only way to prevent more countries going for nuclear weapons and the NPT collapsing.
The UK’s nuclear weapon capability is significantly more important to ENATO than any conventional force we may bring.