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United States I: Bush Policy May Allow Broader Nuclear Use, Analysts Say By David Ruppe The expanded range of options would result from a major shift in U.S. nuclear strategy, recently announced in the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, which de-emphasizes Russia as a threat and would enable the president to have more choices to deal with regional contingencies more flexibly. A Congressional Research Service analysis last month questioned whether that new approach might provide an increased nuclear threat against non-nuclear states and conflict with the so-called “negative security assurances” pledge. State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher last week said the administration would continue to honor the pledge, first made in 1978, which is considered an important reason why most of the world has been willing to renounce nuclear weapons. Boucher also, though, restated another longstanding policy that the United States would not rule out using nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological weapons attack by a non-nuclear state against U.S. interests or allies. A Shift in Approach The Pentagon’s new nuclear weapons strategy was outlined in a Jan. 9 Pentagon briefing, which described a major shift away from the Cold War approach to nuclear planning keyed on the Soviet, then Russian, threat. The strategy would be guided by what is called “capabilities-based” planning, intended to provide the president with a range of nuclear options for dealing with a “range of contingencies” that might occur around the world, according to Pentagon briefing materials. U.S. strategic forces would still have plans for striking China and Russia, according to Scott Sagan, a Stanford University associate professor of political science and an authority on nuclear strategy. “But they would also have lots of smaller options. And my understanding is they are trying to make this to be far more flexible than it has been in the past.” U.S. forces would be prepared to use nuclear weapons, he said, “in a variety of contingencies, ranging from single weapons to larger-scale uses.” Most of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has been targeted at Russia, and to a lesser degree, China, experts say. “To Defeat Any Aggressor” The NPR also charted a major reduction in the number of nuclear warheads deployed worldwide over 10 years, with possibly thousands taken offline and put into storage. The briefing did not specify the degree to which any of the remaining deployed warheads might be retargeted away from Russia, or for what sorts of other new contingencies they might be required. Briefing materials did say, though, that U.S. strategic forces need to provide the president with “a range of options to defeat any aggressor.” That goal, said the Congressional Research Service analysis, may be in conflict with the promise not to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear states. The pledge “may not be consistent with a nuclear posture that declares nuclear weapons to be part of the range of options available to ‘defeat any aggressor,’” according to the CRS analysis. Possible Implications The pledge is a political commitment, not a legal one, so it could be broken by the United States with no legal repercussions, experts say. In 1997 comments, Robert Bell, then special assistant to the president for defense policy and arms control, also offered a view that even a legal commitment to such a pledge could be broken if the target state had broken a treaty such as the Chemical Weapons Convention by using chemicals against U.S. troops. The wronged state can “as a matter of international law … suspend temporarily [its] obligations vis-a-vis nuclear weapons use, for the purpose of halting this violation of another treaty,” said Bell, now a senior NATO official. A potential harmful consequence of the new NPR approach, though, is the impression the United States does not stand by the pledge, a U.S. government nuclear weapons analyst who asked not to be identified said. That impression may encourage declared non-nuclear states to pursue nuclear weapons for their defense, and feel free to do so, the analyst said. The Clinton administration reaffirmed the 1978 pledge in 1995 to gain continued international support for indefinitely extending the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. “Ninety-five percent of the countries in the world insisted that we issue this thing so they feel comfortable in the NPT,” the analyst said. Pentagon Spokesman Lt. Col. Michael Humm said the Nuclear Posture Review changes would not increase the likelihood of nuclear use by the United States since the president will continue to be the final authority on whether to use nuclear weapons. “It is U.S. policy that the authority to use nuclear weapons rests solely with the president, and this policy has not changed as a result of the Nuclear Posture Review.” Experts said the negative security assurances technically do not apply to countries not in good standing with the NPT. Arms Control Association Executive Director Daryl Kimball said, therefore, the pledge might not preclude nuclear strikes on North Korea and possible Iraq. Bell said in his comments, though, that “nowhere in that legal option that our lawyers have identified is there any opportunity for preemption.” Consistent With Previous Policies The U.S. military had plans prepared for using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states outside of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, experts said. Still, Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Strategy Project at the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley said the administration’s posture review “solidifies” an increased emphasis on targeting non-nuclear countries that has been underway since the early to mid-1990s. As early as 1993, then-Commander in Chief of the U.S. Strategic Command Gen. Lee Butler told The New York Times “our focus now is not just the former Soviet Union but any potentially hostile country that has or is seeking weapons of mass destruction.” President Bill Clinton signed a directive in November 1997 believed to include new guidelines permitting U.S. nuclear strikes after enemy attacks using chemical or biological weapons, according to a Washington Post report. Arguing for a Nuclear Role The U.S. Strategic Command, which is solely responsible for planning, targeting and wartime employment of U.S. strategic forces, has argued that nuclear weapons have important deterrence roles in the post-Cold War era. “As STRATCOM embarks on this era of strategic disengagement marked by sharp decreases in the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and former Soviet Union, other more profound, more complex challenges wait on the horizon. Most significant of these challenges is countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical and nuclear,” the command’s Web site says. In a rare document release on nuclear strategy, a formerly classified study written by the command in 1996 and released in 1998, argued U.S. nuclear weapons are an effective tool for deterring biological and chemical weapons use by other states, threatening the harshest response. Nuclear weapons are “our most potent tool of deterrence,” it said. “Although we are not likely to use them in less than matters of greatest national importance, or in less than extreme circumstances, nuclear weapons always cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict in which the U.S. is engaged,” it said. As a practical matter, though, the report said deterrence against weapons of mass destruction would best be accomplished by having the capability of destroying what an adversarial leadership values, such as military capabilities and its survival, “without having to inflict massive civilian casualties." That does not necessarily rule nuclear weapons out as real tools for military planners, according to Sagan. “There are, at least in theory, some discriminate uses of low-level nuclear weapons that could produce less collateral damage than large-scale conventional bombing.” A danger though, he said, of making ambiguous threats is “if it does not work 100 percent of the time, a president might feel extra pressure to use nuclear weapons if biological weapons are used against us, where he might otherwise not.”
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