ABSTRACT
Few issues irritate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) establishment more than the question of no-first-use of nuclear weapons. It puts it on the defensive right from the start, having to argue that NATO is not more reckless than the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when it comes to putting the future of civilization at risk to support narrow strategic interests. The framework is based on concept of escalation, by which any conflict is presumed to be subject to intrinsic expansive tendencies, and is made up of a series of distinct thresholds. These thresholds, when passed, involve the transformation of the conflict in the direction of greater violence that is more widely spread and less easily stopped. In Washington and Moscow anything is better than that, even though the alternatives may not look strikingly more attractive in either Bonn or Warsaw. The more firebreaks that exist, the greater the chance to contain a conflict at a tolerable level of violence.
