Nuking the axis?

The Bush administration breaks a half-century taboo and considers using nuclear weapons in future conflicts. Iason Athanasiadis reports
A secret policy review obtained by the Los Angeles Times outlines a modified nuclear policy whereby the United States would consider the use of non-conventional weapons to further its strategic interests.
The Nuclear Posture Review, as the Pentagon report is known, is a comprehensive blueprint for developing and deploying nuclear weapons. While some of the report is unclassified, key portions remain secret. The obtained copy, originally presented to the Armed Services, Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees of Congress in early January, specified that the Bush administration is considering potential use of nuclear weapons against seven countries, namely the "axis of evil" trio of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, as well as Russia, China, Libya and Syria.
The report recommends the development of new types of nuclear weapons and specifies several scenarios in which they may be required, marking a reversal of President George W Bush's campaign pledge to slash US nuclear weapons stockpiles. The recommendations are considered as controversial as President Bush's characterisation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as forming an "axis of evil." They also conflict with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) signed but not ratified by the United States.
Nuclear strikes were heretofore widely viewed in policy-making circles as primarily an instrument of deterrence and brinkmanship, only to be used as a last resort. In breaking the nuclear taboo, maintained for 56 years, the US marks a pronounced policy change. The logic behind the report's recommendations is that the US nuclear arsenal would not deter Saddam Hussein "because he knows a US president would not drop a 100-kiloton bomb on Baghdad," as Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld said last year. Deterrence would only work, so the argument runs, if the US had "mini-nukes" it might actually consider using.
The contingencies when nuclear weapons might conceivably be employed, according to the report, include "an Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbors, or a North Korean attack on South Korea or a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan." Another theme in the report is the possible use of nuclear weapons to destroy enemy stocks of biological weapons, chemical arms and other arms of mass destruction or respond to an attack in which such weapons are used. Other strategic scenarios whereby the administration may sanction the US military to use nuclear weapons would involve targets able to withstand conventional weapons or "in the event of surprising military developments."
Perhaps the greatest cause for alarm comes from the report's stress on the need to develop alternative types of nuclear weapons that would be more limited in scale and carry a smaller degree of radiation fallout. These include earth-penetrating nuclear weapons for destroying heavily fortified underground bunkers and precision warheads that reduce "collateral damage." The report also calls for improving the intelligence and targeting systems needed for nuclear strikes and the resumption of nuclear testing.
The nuclear posture review "greatly expands the potential use of nuclear weapons," according to John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, a non-proliferation watchdog. "For 56 years, the world has avoided nuclear weapons use despite many grave crises. The Bush administration is now dangerously lowering the threshold for wreaking nuclear devastation."
The report, which reveals the extent to which the Bush administration was shaken by the 11 September attacks, is also ratchetting up an already jittery international climate. It has prompted Dmitry Rozogin, head of Russia's parliamentary affairs committee, to state that his country "should understand that a significant part of the United States' nuclear forces are aimed at objects in the Russian Federation and we should draw our own conclusions from this."
Other critics accused the Bush administration of "reinvigorating the nuclear weapons forces and the vast research and industrial complex that support it," according to Robert Norris, a senior research associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council and an expert on nuclear weapons programmes. "In addition, the Bush administration seems to see a new role for nuclear weapons against the 'axis of evil' and other problem states," he said.
Menzies Campbell, Britain's Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said the report "drives a coach and horses through NATO's nuclear doctrine of minimum deterrent and weapons of last resort. [It] completely changes the terms of debate about nuclear deterrence. America has said that it can now act unilaterally and that it could use nuclear weapons against nations who do not have nuclear capability. Britain will have to think very carefully now about its support for systems such as the national missile defence system."
The report is redolent of the kind of unilateralism that has made the Bush administration notorious. It breaches international law in spirit by including countries that do not have proven nuclear capacity as possible targets. In addition, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea have all signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Washington has promised that it will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Another sensitive political point involves the report's discussion of the US moratorium on nuclear testing. The Bush administration says it has no plans yet to resume nuclear testing. But the report suggests that it might be necessary to resume testing to make new nuclear weapons and ensure the reliability of existing ones. "While the United States is making every effort to maintain the nuclear stockpile without additional nuclear testing, this may not be possible in the indefinite future," it said.
Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear arms expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, has called the report's conclusions "dynamite," saying, "I can imagine what these countries are going to be saying at the UN," in reference to the targeted states.
The disclosures are likely to pose a public relations problem for Vice-President Dick Cheney, whose current 10-day trip to Britain and Middle Eastern countries may be jeopardised by the inclusion of three Arab countries as potential targets. It is likely that Middle Eastern leaders will be alarmed to learn that the Pentagon sees neighbours Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya as potential nuclear battlegrounds.
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