Letter to President Biden Regarding the Nuclear Posture Review, June 2021

Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy Inc.

June 22, 2021

Joseph R. Biden Jr.
President of the United States

Dear Mr. President,

We strongly support your stated intention to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in national security policy. Diminishing the role of these weapons should be a guiding directive in the pending revision of the Nuclear Posture Review. The Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy since 1981 has advocated for non-use and global elimination of nuclear weapons in accordance with international law. We write to urge you to ensure that the NPR reflect both wise policy, particularly in the view of increased risks arising from technological change, and legal obligations. We applaud the extension of New START and your initiative to hold the June 16 Summit with Vladimir Putin, and we were encouraged that you and President Putin agreed to create a Strategic Security Dialogue and to reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

The previous NPR during the Trump administration, like other recent policy statements by the governments of nuclear powers, reflected a disturbing trend toward normalizing nuclear weapons, treating them as just another weapons system to be integrated into general military planning. That trend threatens to weaken the taboo against actual use—a taboo that has held since 1945—and to increase severely the risk of nuclear war by accident, miscalculation, or unintended escalation.

Read the letter in its entirety here.