[Peace-discuss] Bush is crazy

[patton paul]

 The Nuclear Option in Iraq
The U.S. has lowered the bar for using the ultimate weapon
by William M. Arkin


WASHINGTON -- One year after President Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North
Korea the "axis of evil," the United States is thinking about the
unthinkable: It is preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons
against Iraq.

At the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Omaha and inside planning
cells of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, target lists are being scrutinized,
options are being pondered and procedures are being tested to give nuclear
armaments a role in the new U.S. doctrine of "preemption."

According to multiple sources close to the process, the current planning
focuses on two possible roles for nuclear weapons:

attacking Iraqi facilities located so deep underground that they might be
impervious to conventional explosives;

thwarting Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction.

Nuclear weapons have, since they were first created, been part of the
arsenal discussed by war planners. But the Bush administration's decision
to actively plan for possible preemptive use of such weapons, especially
as so-called bunker busters, against Iraq represents a significant
lowering of the nuclear threshold. It rewrites the ground rules of nuclear
combat in the name of fighting terrorism.

It also moves nuclear weapons out of their long-established special
category and lumps them in with all the other military options -- from
psychological warfare, covert operations and Special Forces to air power
in all its other forms.

For the United States to lower the nuclear threshold and break down the
firewall separating nuclear weapons from everything else is unsettling for
at least three reasons.

First, if the United States lowers the nuclear threshold -- even as a
possibility -- it raises the likelihood that other nations will lower
their own thresholds and employ nuclear weapons in situations where they
simply need a stronger military punch. Until now, the United States has
reserved nuclear weapons for retaliation against nuclear attacks or
immediate threats to national survival, a standard tacitly but widely
accepted around the world. If the president believes that Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein poses that kind of danger to the United States, he has
failed to convince the world -- and many U.S. citizens.

Second, the move toward thinking of nuclear weapons as just one more
option among many comes at a time when technology is offering a host of
better choices. Increasingly, the U.S. military has the capability of
disabling underground bases or destroying biological and chemical weapons
without uncorking the nuclear bottle, through a combination of
sophisticated airpower, special operations and such 21st century
capabilities as high-powered microwave weapons and cyber warfare.

Third, there are dangers in concentrating the revision of nuclear policy
within a single military command, STRATCOM, which until now has been
focused strictly on strategic -- not policy -- issues of nuclear combat.
Command staff members have unrivaled expertise in the usage and effects of
nuclear weapons, but their expertise does not extend to the whys of
weapons usage.

Entrusting major policy reviews to tightly controlled, secret
organizations inside the Pentagon is a hallmark of Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld's tenure. Doing so streamlines decision-making and
encourages new thinking, advocates say.

But it also bypasses dissenters, many of whom are those in the armed
services with the most knowledge and the deepest experience with the
issues. The Bush inner circle is known to be a tight bunch, prone to
"group think" about Iraq and uninterested in having its assumptions
challenged. But there are opinions they need to hear. While most military
officers seem to consider the likelihood of our using nuclear weapons in
Iraq to be low, they worry about the increased importance placed on them
and about the contradictions inherent in contemplating the use of nuclear
weapons for the purpose of eliminating weapons of mass destruction.

The administration's interest in nuclear contingency plans stems from its
deeply held conviction that the United States must act against Iraq
because of a new and more dangerous terrorist threat involving weapons of
mass destruction.

"The gravest danger our nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism
and technology," Bush declared in the introduction to his national
security strategy, issued last fall. It said enemies of the United States
"have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction."

In May, Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 17,
officially confirming the doctrine of preemptively thwarting any potential
use of weapons of mass destruction.

"U.S. military and appropriate civilian agencies must possess the full
range of operational capabilities to counter the threat and use of WMD,"
the president reiterated last December in his National Strategy to Combat
Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The current nuclear planning, revealed in interviews with military
officers and described in documents reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, is
being carried out at STRATCOM's Omaha headquarters, among small teams in
Washington and at Vice President Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" in
Pennsylvania.

The command, previously responsible for nuclear weapons alone, has seen
its responsibilities mushroom. On Dec. 11, the Defense secretary sent Bush
a memorandum asking for authority to place Adm. James O. Ellis Jr., the
STRATCOM commander, in charge of the full range of "strategic" warfare
options to combat terrorist states and organizations.

The memo, obtained by The Times, recommended assigning all
responsibilities for dealing with foreign weapons of mass destruction,
including "global strike; integrated missile defense; [and] information
operations" to STRATCOM. That innocuous-seeming description of
responsibilities covers enormous ground, bringing everything from the use
of nuclear weapons to nonnuclear strikes to covert and special operations
to cyber warfare and "strategic deception" under the purview of nuclear
warriors.

Earlier this month, Bush approved Rumsfeld's proposal. On the surface,
these new assignments give the command a broader set of tools to avoid
nuclear escalation. In reality, they open the door much wider to
contemplating American use of nuclear weapons. The use of biological or
chemical weapons against the U.S. military could be seen as worthy of the
same response as a Russian nuclear attack. If Iraq were to use biological
or chemical weapons during a war with the United States, it could have
tragic consequences, but it would not alter the war's outcome. Our use of
nuclear weapons to defeat Hussein, on the other hand, has the potential to
create a political and global disaster, one that would forever pit the
Arab and Islamic world against us.

How great a change these steps represent are revealed in the fact that
STRATCOM owes its existence to previous post-Cold War policymakers who
considered it vital to erect a great firewall between nuclear and
conventional forces.

Now, with almost no discussion inside the Pentagon or in public, Rumsfeld
and the Bush White House are tearing that firewall down. Instead of
separating nuclear and conventional weapons, Rumsfeld is merging them in
one command structure with a disturbingly simple mission: "If you can find
that time-critical, key terrorist target or that
weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpile, and you have minutes rather than
hours or days to deal with it, how do you reach out and negate that threat
to our nation half a world away?" Ellis asked in December.

The rapid transformation of Ellis' command reveals his answer to that
rhetorical question. Since 9/11, Ellis and his command have been bombarded
with new demands and responsibilities. First, the Pentagon's nuclear
posture review, signed by Rumsfeld in December 2001 and issued in final
form in early 2002, directed the military to reinvigorate its nuclear
capability. STRATCOM was to play a leading role in that reinvigoration.

Among other things, the still-classified posture review said, "nuclear
weapons could be employed against targets able to withstand nonnuclear
attack (for example, deep underground bunkers or bioweapon facilities)."

The review called upon the military to develop "deliberate pre-planned and
practiced missions" to attack WMD facilities, even if an enemy did not use
nuclear weapons first against the United States or its allies.

According to STRATCOM documents and briefings, its newly created Theater
Planning Activity has now taken on all aspects of assessing chemical,
biological, and nuclear weapons facilities worldwide. Planners have
focused intelligence gathering and analysis on seven priority target
nations (the "axis of evil" nations along with Syria, Libya, China and
Russia) and have completed a detailed analysis of intelligence data
available on all suspect sites. According to U.S. Central Command sources,
a "Theater Nuclear Planning Document" for Iraq has been prepared for the
administration and Central Command.

What worries many senior officials in the armed forces is not that the
United States has a vast array of weapons or contingency plans for using
them. The danger is that nuclear weapons -- locked away in a Pandora's box
for more than half a century -- are being taken out of that lockbox and
put on the shelf with everything else. While Pentagon leaders insist that
does not mean they take nuclear weapons lightly, critics fear that
removing the firewall and adding nuclear weapons to the normal option
ladder makes their use more likely -- especially under a policy of
preemption that says Washington alone will decide when to strike.

To make such a doctrine encompass nuclear weapons is to embrace a view
that, sooner or later, will spread beyond the moral capitals of Washington
and London to New Delhi and Islamabad, to Pyongyang and Baghdad, Beijing,
Tel Aviv and to every nuclear nation of the future.

If that happens, the world will have become infinitely more dangerous than
it was two years ago, when George W. Bush took the presidential oath of
office.

William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for
Opinion.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times