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Subject: Progressive Review - A Revolution in American Nuclear Policy
Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 10:18:52 +0000 [View Source]

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - May 30, 2005

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A Revolution in American Nuclear Policy
By Jonathan Schell
Tom Dispatch

A metaphorical "nuclear option" -- the cutoff of debate in
the Senate on judicial nominees -- has just been defused,
but a literal nuclear option, called "global strike," has
been created in its place. In a shocking innovation in
American nuclear policy, recently disclosed in the
Washington Post by military analyst William Arkin, the
administration has created and placed on continuous high
alert a force whereby the President can launch a pinpoint
strike, including a nuclear strike, anywhere on earth with
a few hours' notice. The senatorial "nuclear option" was
covered extensively, but somehow this actual nuclear option
-- a "full-spectrum" capability (in the words of the
presidential order) with "precision kinetic (nuclear and
conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and
information operations)" -- was almost entirely ignored.

The order to enable the force, Arkin writes, was given by
George W. Bush in January 2003. In July 2004, Gen. Richard
Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated to
Adm. James Ellis Jr., then-commander of Stratcom, "the
President charged you to 'be ready to strike at any moment's
notice in any dark corner of the world' [and] that's exactly
what you've done." And last fall, Lieut. Gen. Bruce Carlson,
commander of the 8th Air Force, stated, "We have the
capacity to plan and execute global strikes."

These actions make operational a revolution in US nuclear
policy. It was foreshadowed by the Nuclear Posture Review
Report of 2002, also widely ignored, which announced nuclear
targeting of, among others, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran,
Syria and Libya. The review also recommended new facilities
for the manufacture of nuclear bombs and the study of an
array of new delivery vehicles, including a new ICBM in
2020, a new submarine-launched ballistic missile in 2029,
and a new heavy bomber in 2040. The review, in turn, grew
out of Bush's broader new military strategy of pre-emptive
war, articulated in the 2002 White House document, the
National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
which states, "We cannot let our enemies strike first." The
extraordinary ambition of the Bush policy is suggested by a
comment made in a Senate hearing in April by Linton Brooks,
head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who
explained that the Defense Secretary wanted "bunker buster"
nuclear bombs because "it is unwise for there to be anything
that's beyond the reach of US power."

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The incorporation of nuclear weapons into the global strike
option, casting a new shadow of nuclear danger over the
entire planet, raises fundamental questions. Perhaps the
most important is why the United States, which now possesses
the strongest conventional military forces in the world,
feels the need to add to them a new global nuclear threat.
The mystery deepens when you reflect that nothing could be
more calculated to goad other nations into nuclear
proliferation. Could it be that the United States, now
routinely called the greatest empire since Rome, simply
feels the need to assert its dominance in the nuclear
sphere?

History suggests a different explanation. In the past,
reliance on nuclear arms has in fact varied inversely with
reliance on conventional arms. In the very first weeks of
the nuclear age, when the American public was demanding
demobilization of US forces in Europe after World War II,
the U.S. monopoly on the bomb gave it the confidence to
adopt a bold stance in postwar negotiations with the Soviet
Union over Europe. The practice of offsetting conventional
weakness with nuclear strength was soon embodied in the
policy of "first use" of nuclear weapons, which has remained
in effect to this day. The threat of first use under the
auspices of the global strike option is indeed the latest
incarnation of a policy born at that time.

This compensatory role for nuclear weapons emerged in a new
context when, after the protracted, unpopular conventional
war in Korea, President Eisenhower adopted the doctrine of
nuclear "massive retaliation," intended to prevent limited
Communist challenges from ever arising. And it was in
reaction to the imbalance between local "peripheral" threats
and the world-menacing "massive" nuclear threats designed to
contain them that, in the Kennedy years, the pendulum swung
back in the direction of conventional arms and a theory of
"limited war" to go with them. Meanwhile, nuclear arms were
officially assigned the more restricted role of deterring
attacks by other nuclear weapons -- the posture of "mutual
assured destruction."

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Today, though the Cold War is over, the riddle of the
relationship between nuclear and conventional force still
vexes official minds. Once again, the United States has
assigned itself global ambitions. (Then it was containing
Communism, now it is stopping "terrorism" and proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction.) Once again, the United
States is fighting a limited war -- the war in Iraq -- and
other limited wars are under discussion (against Iran,
North Korea, Syria, etc.). And once again, nuclear arms
appear to offer an all too tempting alternative. Arkin
comments that a prime virtue of the global strike option
in the eyes of the Pentagon is that it requires no "boots
on the ground." And Everett Dolman, a professor at the Air
Force School at Maxwell Air Force Base, recently commented
to the San Francisco Chronicle that without space weaponry,
"we'd face a Vietnam-style buildup if we wanted to remain a
force in the world."

For just as in the 1950s, the boots on the ground are
running low. The global New Rome turns out to have exhausted
its conventional power holding down just one country, Iraq.
But the 2000s are not the 1950s. Eisenhower's overall goal
was mainly defensive. He wanted no war, nuclear or
conventional, and never came close to ordering a nuclear
strike. By contrast, Bush's policy of preventive war is
inherently activist and aggressive: The global strike option
is not only for deterrence; it is for use.

A clash between the triumphal rhetoric of global domination
and the sordid reality of failure in practice lies ahead.
The Senate, on the brink of its metaphorical Armageddon,
backed down. Would the President, facing defeat of his
policies somewhere in the world, do likewise? Or might he
actually reach for his nuclear option?

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