It is generally regarded as ineffective against a rational opponent who has or is an ally of someone who has assured destruction capability. If both states have nuclear weapons, the form of nuclear blackmail becomes a threat of escalation. In this situation if the opponent refuses to respond, then one's choices are either surrender or suicide. During the Cold War, the explicit threat of nuclear warfare to force an opponent to perform an action was rare in that most nations were allies of either the Soviet Union or the United States.
History
In 1950, President Truman publicly stated that the use of nuclear weapons was under "active consideration" against Communist Chinese targets during the Korean War. In 1953, President Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclear weapons to end the Korean War if the Communist Chinese refused to negotiate. In order to support the continued existence of the Republic of China government, the United States issued several nuclear threats against the People's Republic of China in the 1950s to force the evacuation of outlying islands and the cessation of attacks against Quemoy and Matsu. Declassified documents from the National Archives indicate that the United Kingdom considered threatening China with nuclear retaliation in 1961 in the event of a military reclamation of Hong Kong by China. Ali Magoudi, a psychoanalyst of French president François Mitterrand, claimed that Margaret Thatcher threatened nuclear war againstArgentina during the 1982 Falklands War in order to procure codes from France to disable Argentina's French-made missiles. This claim has not been confirmed by either the French or British governments. In 1981, the United States Department of Energy said there had been 75 cases of nuclear blackmail against the United States, though only several were serious attempts. In 1991, Israel threatened Iraq with a "nuclear counter-response" if Iraq attacked with chemical weapons during the Gulf War. In 2002, the Bush administration declared that they were prepared to strike with nuclear missiles against Iraq if biological or chemical weapons were used against American troops or their allies during the Iraq War. On January 2, 2018, Donald Trump threatened North Korea that the US has much more nuclear firepower than North Korea, in response to their press release stating that a "nuclear button is on Kim Jong-un's desk at all times".
In fiction
Nuclear blackmail, typically by a supervillain rather than a state, has been frequently employed as a plot device in spy fiction and action films. Since such a scheme appeared in the film Thunderball, the trope has been particularly associated with the James Bond series and the TV series24. The notion of a supervillain threatening world leaders with a nuclear device has since become a cliché, and has been parodied in Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale, , The Simpsons episode "You Only Move Twice", and other espionage spoofs.
