Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (1997) has refined an argument due to Thomas Baldwin (1996), which claims to prove nihilism, the thesis that there could have been no concrete objects, and which apparently does so without reliance on any heavy-duty metaphysics of modality. This note will show that on either reading of its key premiss, the subtraction argument Rodriguez-Pereyra proposes is invalid. [A sequel to this paper, 'The Subtraction Argument(s)', was published in Dialectica in 2006.].