From The Philadelphia Inquirer

March 18, 2002

US Nuclear Posture: Bent Out of Shape?

Policy Is a Dangerous Return to Anxieties of the Cold War

By Walter C. Uhler

Thanks to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, we now know much more about the contents of the Bush administration's secret "Nuclear Posture Review." But it's not a pretty sight. In essence, America's undue fascination with dropping the bomb on somebody became further unhinged in the wake of Sept. 11, which is bad news indeed. For, as Joseph Gerson wrote before Sept. 11, "on more than 20 occasions since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and at least 5 times since the end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents have prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war during international crises and wars."

Notwithstanding the Bush administration's comforting public statements about reducing our nuclear arsenal, we now know that the President and the Pentagon are taking steps to be able to explode nuclear weapons: (1) against targets impervious to conventional weapons, (2) in retaliation for an attack using nuclear, biological or chemical weapons and (3) "in the event of surprising military developments." Seven countries—China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Syria—have been listed as potential recipients of such explosions.

Unhinged indeed! According to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985), a one-megaton nuclear explosion would create a crater 300 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter, extinguishing all life there. Within a second, the atmosphere would ignite into a fireball a half mile in diameter, extinguishing all life there. Within 12 seconds, the heat and blast preceding the firestorm would immediately kill half of the people living within 3 miles. Within 40 seconds the shock and developing firestorm would kill almost all inhabitants within 6 miles and up to half the population within 12 miles. Radiation would eventually kill many of the survivors within that radius.

Granted, the "Nuclear Posture Review" does address a downside to such destruction. But it's not the one you might guess. Instead, it seeks to answer potential aggressors who might exploit America's hesitancy to employ such nuclear devastation to combat terrorism or a rogue state. Thus, the "Nuclear Posture Review" urges the development of smaller, bunker-busting nukes to bring discrimination to nuclear warfare (an oxymoron)—while lowering the threshold for such warfare.

If we are to judge from the "Nuclear Posture Review," the Bush administration believes that America is above the mundane practical and moral concerns once addressed by Robert S. McNamara: "To initiate a nuclear strike against a comparably equipped opponent would have been tantamount to committing suicide. To initiate use against a nonnuclear opponent would have been militarily unnecessary, politically indefensible, and morally repugnant."

The "Nuclear Posture Review" ignores world opinion that increasingly views such use as criminal. On July 8, 1996, the World Court issued an advisory opinion stating that "the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law." The court envisioned but one circumstance in which the use of nuclear weapons by a state might not constitute a crime against humanity: the "extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which its very survival would be at stake."

That's not what the "Nuclear Posture Review" envisions. What's new in the document, or what's so old it seems new, is the disturbing conviction that nuclear arms would actually be useful weapons of limited-engagement war. The document also proclaims a "New Triad"-which vividly demonstrates that the Bush administration seeks missile defense less to protect America from a surprise attack and more to enable America to threaten or initiate nuclear war with impunity.

Last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed Keith Payne to advise the Pentagon on the "Nuclear Posture Review." Payne's recent book, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction, states that the United States will require missile defense because "in the post-Cold War period it will be regional aggressors threatening Washington with nuclear escalation in the event the United States needs to project force into their regional neighborhoods" (my emphasis).

Regional aggressors: Russia? China? Regional neighborhoods: Chechnya? Taiwan? The "Nuclear Posture Review" explicitly mentions the possible use of the bomb against China in defense of Taiwan. Yet this very willingness to initiate such a crime against humanity guarantees not only the rapid growth of China's nuclear arsenal (and thus India's and Pakistan's), but also the outrage of the international community.

Sept. 11 unhinged America's secret nuclear posture even further from morality and reality. Now thoughtful Americans have the opportunity to restore both.



Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).

waltuhler@aol.com