WASHINGTON - Amid increasing tension
between the United States and Iran over Tehran's
nuclear program, and growing concern about
overstretched US ground forces, the George W Bush
administration is moving steadily toward adopting
the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against
non-nuclear states as an integral part of its
global military strategy.
According to a
March document by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that
was recently posted to the Pentagon's website,
Washington will not necessarily wait for potential
adversaries to use what it calls "weapons of mass
destruction" before resorting to a nuclear strike
against them. The document, entitled "Doctrine for
Joint Nuclear Operations", has yet to be approved
by Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld, according to an
account published in Sunday's Washington Post.
However, it is largely consistent with the
administration's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review
(NPR), which was widely assailed by arms control
advocates for lowering the threshold for the use
of nuclear weapons by the US.
"What we see
as significant is that they are considering using
nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers in
preemptive first strikes," Ivan Oelrich, of the
Federation for American Scientists (FAS), said
about the NPR and the new doctrine.
The
doctrine would also appear to contradict the
administration's oft-stated claim that it is
significantly reducing the role of nuclear weapons
in its global military strategy.
"The new
doctrine reaffirms an aggressive nuclear posture
of modernized nuclear weapons maintained on high
alert," Hans Kristensen, of the Natural Resources
Defense Council (NRDC), wrote last week in Arms
Control Today magazine. "The new doctrine's
approach grants regional nuclear-strike planning
an increasingly expeditionary aura that threatens
to make nuclear weapons just another tool in the
toolbox.
"The result is nuclear
preemption, which the new doctrine enshrines into
official US joint nuclear doctrine for the first
time, where the objective no longer is deterrence
through threatened retaliation but battlefield
destruction of targets."
The doctrine is
the latest in a series of documents adopted by the
administration that has moved the US away from the
traditional view that nuclear weapons should be
used solely for the purposes of defense and
deterrence.
Along with the NPR, which
called for the development of new delivery systems
for nuclear weapons and noted that China, North
Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya could all be
targets, the new view was expounded by Bush
himself in his September 2002 National Security
Strategy document. "We cannot let our enemies
strike first," he warned at the time.
In
mid-2004, according to national security analyst
William Arkin, Rumsfeld approved a top-secret
"Interim Global Strike Alert Order", which
directed the military to be prepared to attack
potential adversaries that are developing weapons
of mass destruction, notably Iran and North Korea.
The order, according to a classified
January 2003 presidential directive obtained by
Arkin, is defined as including nuclear, as well as
conventional, strikes "in support of theater and
national objectives".
The new document is
the first to spell out various contingencies in
which a preemptive nuclear strike might be used,
including:
If an adversary intended to use weapons of
mass destruction against the US multinational or
allied forces or a civilian population
In cases of an imminent attack from an
adversary's biological weapons that only effects
from nuclear weapons can safely destroy
Against adversary installations, including
weapons of mass destruction; deep, hardened
bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons;
or the command-and-control infrastructure required
for the adversary to execute a weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) attack against the US or its
friends and allies
In cases where a demonstration of US intent
and capability to use nuclear weapons would deter
weapons of mass destruction use by an adversary.
The previous doctrine, promulgated under
the Clinton administration in 1995 made no mention
of the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against
any target, let alone describe scenarios in which
such use would be considered.
Moreover,
the new doctrine blurs the distinction that
existed during the Cold War between strategic and
theater nuclear weapons by "assigning all nuclear
weapons, whether strategic or nonstrategic,
support roles in theater nuclear operations",
according to Kristensen.
Another
particularly worrisome aspect of the latest
doctrine, according to Oelrich, is its conflation
of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as one
"WMD" threat that could justify a US nuclear
strike, particularly given the huge disparity in
destructive and lethal impact between chemical
weapons, on the one hand, and nuclear arms on the
other.
"What we are seeing now is an
effort to lay the foundations for the legitimacy
of using nuclear weapons if [the administration]
suspects another country might use chemical
weapons against us," he said. "Iraq is a perfect
example of how this doctrine might actually work;
it was a country where we were engaged militarily
and thought it would deploy chemical weapons
against us."
Critics also fear that
resorting to nuclear weapons may have become
increasingly attractive to the administration as
the Army and Marines have become bogged down in
Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan.
"[US Strategic Command] planners,
recognizing that US ground forces are already over
committed, say that a global strike must be able
to be implemented 'without resort to large numbers
of general purpose forces,'" according to Arkin's
account of recent directives received by
commanders charged with contingency planning.
The new strategy may also be relevant to
the situation in Iran, which is known to have
chemical weapons but whose nuclear program
Washington insists is being used to produce
weapons as well.
Writing in The American
Conservative magazine last month, columnist Philip
Giraldi, a former CIA officer who also worked at
the Defense Intelligence Agency, reported that
Vice President Dick Cheney's office had tasked the
United States Strategic Command with drawing up a
contingency plan for a "large-scale air assault on
Iran employing both conventional and tactical
nuclear weapons" in the event of another September
11-type terrorist attack.
"Many of the
targets are hardened or are deep underground and
could not be taken out by conventional weapons,
hence the nuclear option," he wrote.
In
fact, it is questionable whether even US nuclear
weapons could reach their hardened targets
underground, which is why the Pentagon has been
pressing Congress for several years to finance
research into the development of the so-called
Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.
Democrats
and a small minority of Republicans in the House
of Representatives have so far blocked the
administration's request, although it will be
taken up later this fall by a joint House-Senate
conference committee. The new strategy may be
aimed in part at exerting pressure on the
lawmakers to approve the request.
Meanwhile, however, administration critics
warn that instead of deterring potential
adversaries from pursuing nuclear weapons, the new
doctrine is almost certain to have the opposite
effect.
"We make it seem that nuclear
weapons are essential to our security," noted
Oelrich. "So it immensely enhances the cachet of
nuclear weapons to others."
