AbstractWe show that the well‐known necessary and sufficient conditions for a relative maximum of a nonlinear differentiable objective function with nonnegative variables constrained by nonlinear differentiable inequalities may be derived using the classical theory of equality constrained optimization problems with unrestricted variables. To do this we transform the original inequality‐constrained problem to an equivalent equality‐constrained problem by means of a well‐known squared‐variable transformation. Our major result is to show that second order conditions must be used to obtain the Kuhn‐Tucker conditions by this approach. Our nonlinear programming results are motivated by the development of some well‐known linear programming results by