U.S. Vs. Them by Scoblic J. Peter

Author:Scoblic, J. Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

The United States had long considered using nuclear weapons first in a conflict—most notably if the Red Army had attacked Western Europe, overwhelming our conventional forces. But the Cold War was over, and, rather than diminishing the role of weapons no president had ever wanted to use, the Bush administration was talking about their preemptive, preventive, or simply convenient use against much lesser threats. This was unprecedented—and went far beyond the so-called strategic ambiguity that Bush 41 and Clinton had referred to in suggesting that the United States might respond to a chemical or biological attack with nuclear weapons. The Bush administration was blurring, if not erasing, the line between conventional and nuclear weapons and lowering the threshold at which the nation would go nuclear, proposing an array of tactical uses for weapons that were supposed to be used only in strategic conflicts. The Bush Pentagon was effectively acknowledging that the United States might use nuclear weapons first, against a nonnuclear state, before any hostilities had taken place. In fact, the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations went as far as to replace the phrase “nuclear war” with “conflict involving nuclear weapons” throughout, because “nuclear war” implied that both sides were participating, when, according to the Pentagon, most nuclear conflicts were likely to be one-sided.

This was not just abstract theorizing. In 2002, the administration asked Congress for $15 million to study development of a modified, robust nuclear earth penetrator—a weapon that could drill into the ground and destroy a deeply buried bunker. It also requested that Congress rescind a ban it had imposed on researching low-yield weapons—that is, weapons with less than five kilotons of explosive power. Legislators have yet to fund these programs, but the navy has already made changes to the Trident missile’s reentry vehicle that give it far greater accuracy, making it suitable for Global Strike-type precision missions.17 The Pentagon has incorporated the ability to plan and rapidly execute a range of nuclear strikes against regional actors into the same computer platform that governs the national nuclear war plan (formerly known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, now known as Operational Plan, or OPLAN, 8044-2). The Nuclear Posture Review also called for building a new facility to manufacture plutonium cores for nuclear weapons, a new facility for producing tritium (the isotope that is fused in hydrogen bombs and that is used to boost the yield of fission weapons), and a new infrastructure for conducting nuclear tests—to say nothing of its call for a new ICBM by 2018, a new nuclear submarine and SLBM by 2028, and a new nuclear bomber by 2040 to replace aging delivery systems.

This emphasis on a flexible nuclear offense was not a response to the attacks of September 11. Many of these developments had been previewed in a report the National Institute for Public Policy issued in January 2001, just as the Bush administration took office. NIPP is a conservative think tank run by Keith Payne—the same Keith Payne who in 1980

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