WSWS : News & Analysis : US plans widespread use of nuclear weapons in war

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WSWS : News & Analysis : North America

US plans widespread use of nuclear weapons in war
Bush orders Pentagon to target seven nations for
attack
By Patrick Martin
11 March 2002

The Bush administration has told the US military to
greatly expand preparations for the use of nuclear
weapons in future wars, according to press reports on
the weekend which have been confirmed by the Pentagon
and White House.

The Pentagon has been directed to develop contingency
plans for nuclear attacks on seven different
countries. These include China and Russia, the two
powers which have long been targeted by the US nuclear
arsenal; Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the three
countries demonized by Bush as the ?axis of evil? in
his State of the Union speech; and Libya and Syria.

An initial draft of this report, called the ?Nuclear
Posture Review,? was delivered to Congress on January
8. A copy of the classified material was obtained by
William Arkin, military columnist for the Los Angeles
Times, and the newspaper reported its contents March
9. The New York Times obtained the same material a day
later.

In addition to the naming of targeted countries?the
first such list ever made public?the Nuclear Posture
Review outlines a much broader range of political,
strategic and tactical scenarios under which the US
government would use nuclear weapons.

The report says the Pentagon should be prepared to use
nuclear weapons in an Arab-Israeli conflict, in a war
between China and Taiwan, or in an attack from North
Korea on South Korea. They might also become necessary
in an attack by Iraq on Israel or another neighbor, it
said.

The last contingency is the one which is most
imminent, since the US is openly preparing for a
military assault on Iraq, which could well provoke the
launching of Iraqi Scud missiles against Israel, as in
1991 during the previous US-Iraq war. Based on the
criteria outlined in the Pentagon review, the firing
of such missiles from mobile truck-mounted launchers
could be answered by the dropping of an atomic bomb on
Iraqi military facilities in the western desert, or
even on Baghdad.


When could nuclear weapons be used?

The Pentagon document, for the first time, spells out
the determination of US war planners to use nuclear
weapons in a military conflict in which the opposing
side either did not possess nuclear weapons or had
them but did not use them. The language of the report
is broad and open-ended.

The review says nuclear weapons ?could be employed
against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack,?
i.e., under any circumstances where a conventional US
military assault was proving to be unsuccessful. Such
a contingency could develop at almost any point in
Afghanistan, as the recent fighting near Gardez has
shown.

Even more sweeping is the suggestion that nuclear
weapons could be used ?in the event of surprising
military developments.? Pentagon officials told the
New York Times that such language was intended to
cover the possible use of new types of weapons of mass
destruction by terrorists, but it could apply equally
well to a terrorist attack like September 11, which
the Bush administration claims came as a total
surprise. The Nuclear Posture Review would seem to
authorize nuclear retaliation in the event of any such
attack.

The Pentagon planning document also calls for a wider
range of tactical uses for nuclear weapons, through
the development of smaller-scale and lower-yield
warheads that could have a practical use for such
tasks as the destruction of heavily fortified
underground bunkers. The review calls for building
more precise ?warheads that reduce collateral damage.?
Developing such warheads would require the resumption
of underground nuclear testing by the United States.

The report declares: ?Nuclear attack options that vary
in scale, scope, and purpose will complement other
military capabilities.? The Air Force would modify its
extended-range cruise missile and the F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter to carry nuclear warheads. Even US
Special Forces operators would be able to call in
nuclear strikes, playing the same intelligence
gathering and targeting roles for nuclear weapons that
they did for conventional bombs and missiles in
Afghanistan.

The overall import of these changes is to transform
nuclear bombs from the ?last resort? into weapons
which can be used at will on the battlefield. As one
nuclear expert, Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, observed, ?This
clearly makes nuclear weapons a tool for fighting a
war, rather than deterring them.?

The Nuclear Posture Review, despite its ponderous
bureaucratic name, is an intensely political document.
When the incoming Reagan administration sought to
reverse three decades of Cold War policy based on the
doctrine of containment, it drafted a new Nuclear
Posture Review in 1981 which discarded the doctrine of
Mutual Assured Destruction and set a goal of achieving
nuclear strategic superiority. Its aim was to ensure
that the US would survive a devastating nuclear
exchange with the Soviet Union with enough intact and
unused nuclear weapons to ?prevail? in a
post-apocalypse world.

This lunatic perspective remained the official US
military doctrine until the Clinton administration
ordered a review in 1994, which was not completed
until 1997, with the issuance of a new planning
document. The Clinton document remains classified, but
press reports suggest that it contained the first
language authorizing the retargeting of US missiles
and bombers from Russia to China, North Korea and
several countries in the Middle East.

The Bush administration?s nuclear plan is another act
of brazen lawlessness by a government which thumbs its
nose at international obligations. The US is bound, as
a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers.
The Bush directive does not yet violate the letter of
the treaty, but it instructs the Pentagon to make all
the necessary preparations to do so. It is an
announcement in advance that the US government will
violate the treaty whenever it deems it desirable.


A policy of intimidation

The swift White House confirmation of the report in
the Los Angeles Times, and the willingness of the
Pentagon officials to discuss the issue?normally a
closely guarded secret?suggest that the report may be
a deliberate leak by the Bush administration, timed to
advance its military and diplomatic agenda by
intimidating both potential adversaries and
prospective allies in the Middle East.

The report was published the day before Vice President
Cheney left Washington for a 10-day trip to Britain
and the Middle East to line up support for the next
stage in the US campaign of military aggression, which
is almost certainly the launching of a massive assault
on Iraq. And it comes two days before Bush gives a
nationally televised speech, on the six-month
anniversary of the September 11 attacks, in which he
is expected to threaten American military intervention
in many more countries, in addition to the current
deployment of troops and military advisers in
Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Philippines, Georgia,
Yemen and Colombia.

The British-based Observer newspaper reported March 10
that Cheney was bringing to London a request that the
Blair government contribute 25,000 troops towards the
250,000 which are projected as necessary for the
conquest of Iraq.

The newspaper said that a considerable military
buildup towards ground war in Iraq is already under
way, including Special Forces training of Iraqi exiles
and Kurdish forces in the north of Iraq, the
deployment of a battalion of 25 Longbow Apache attack
helicopters in Kuwait, and the overhauling of 5,000 US
fighting vehicles, both tanks and armored cars, which
have been in storage in Kuwait since the 1991 war.

The New York Times, in its analysis of the report,
noted the one-sided and bullying character of the new
nuclear doctrine, writing cynically, ?unlike the old
strategic formula of mutual assured destruction, or
MAD, in which nuclear superpowers deter each other
into a détente, the Pentagon?s new saber-rattling is
meant to signal something different. That is a
unilateral assured destruction...?

The Pentagon report specifically denounces the arms
control treaties between the US and the Soviet Union
which were characteristic of the Cold War, declaring,
?That old process is incompatible with the flexibility
U.S. planning and forces now require.? The new
doctrine makes it clear that it was only the existence
of the USSR?despite the treacherous
counterrevolutionary politics of the Stalinist
bureaucracy?that blocked American imperialism from
using its nuclear arsenal more or less at will during
the last half century.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United
States is projecting military power into Central Asia,
seeking to dominate the oil-rich region around the
Caspian Sea, and preparing for the second major war in
a decade in the Persian Gulf. And now, with the
issuance of this thinly veiled nuclear ultimatum,
every regime in the region?and throughout the world?is
put on notice that if they oppose American policies
they can be targeted for nuclear incineration.

The release of the nuclear planning document must send
shock waves throughout the world. The declaration that
nuclear weapons are to become a practical weapon of
war, for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
is extraordinarily provocative. It makes it clear to
anyone not blinded by propaganda that the United
States has become the most reckless international
bully since German imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s.

The US government publicly acknowledges it is
targeting seven countries?whose combined population
amounts to a quarter of the human race?for nuclear
attack. These countries must necessarily assume that
the United States intends to carry out these threats,
and they must plan accordingly. But any defensive
countermeasures which they undertake, including the
development of their own weapons of mass destruction
to serve as a deterrent, will be portrayed by the Bush
administration as an action which justifies the
attack.

The Bush administration?s policies have objective
implications. The new Pentagon doctrine brings the
world far closer to the actual use of nuclear weapons
of war, with incalculable consequences for humanity.
Indeed, such a war is all but inevitable unless other
social forces intervene and take the decision out of
the hands of the imperialists. That is the task facing
the international working class.



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