Asia Times Online


	March 15, 2002	atimes.com

Front

US lowers nuclear barriers
By Ehsan Ahrari

The Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), leaked to the press last Sunday, has underscored how much US President George W Bush's thinking is colored by the September 11 attacks.

To be sure, there are elements of continuity between the NPR and the PDD60 - the document on nuclear targeting - of the Bill Clinton years; however, Bush's NPR has lowered the nuclear threshold, the denials of the National Security Adviser Condeleezza Rice, notwithstanding. Just examine the evidence.

The Bush administration has included seven countries in its list of possible nuclear targets: Russia, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya. Of these, only the first two are nuclear powers ("nuclear weapons states", to be precise). There is a suspicion that North Korea has one nuclear weapon in its arsenal. Iraq is only suspected of having made some progress in its capabilities to manufacture weapons of mass destruction (WMD), presumably chemical and biological weapons, since the expulsion of United Nations weapons inspectors in 1998. The nature of nuclear research is such that it is not possible for the Iraqi nuclear activities to go undetected, considering its territory is constantly being scanned by American satellites, and probed by nuclear sensors stationed in neighboring countries.

Iran is known to have acquired nuclear technology from Russia and even, perhaps, from China, but has no known indigenous technical capabilities to develop nuclear weapons. Iran also possesses chemical weapons, largely because it was the victim of Iraqi chemical attacks during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Syria and Libya have no nuclear capabilities, but both are suspected to have chemical weapons in their arsenals. Iran, Syria, and Libya have SCUD-type missiles in their possession, but only Iran has made any noticeable progress in developing short-to-medium-range ballistic missiles. However, even those missiles are known to have constant problems with their booster systems.

Of the seven countries on its NPR target list, the United States has justified the inclusion of Russia, largely because it, like the United States, possesses a large nuclear arsenal. The Bush administration has also noted that the focus of its targeting on Russia would intensify if the ties between the two nuclear giants were to worsen in the future. Besides, an unspoken aspect of keeping an eye on Russia is the fact that that country has also increased its own declared reliance on nuclear weapons, largely due to the worsening shape of its conventional military power.

The inclusion of China, and the specific reference to the Taiwan issue, on the target list is worrisome, especially in view of Bush's statement last April that his administration would take whatever actions necessary if China was to attack Taiwan. The NPR lists the fact that China is "developing strategic objectives" as an additional rationale for including it on its target list. As a response, the Chinese leaders would not only intensify endeavors to build up their own strategic nuclear missile force, but would also escalate the pace of their countermeasure maneuverability to overwhelm both the impending national missile defense (NMD) and the theater missile defense (TMD) systems that the Bush administration plans to develop in the coming years.

The strained Sino-US ties, when viewed from the prism of the NPR, portray a grim picture indeed.

But it is regarding North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya that Washington seems to have clearly lowered the nuclear threshold, or, to put it differently, reversed the long tradition of viewing nuclear weapons as weapons of last resort. To be fair to Bush, that particular tradition was given a purposeful jolt when his father, George H W Bush, conveyed to Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 1990 that if he were to use chemical weapons against the US-led international coalition of forces, his administration would consider "the strongest possible response".

Bush Senior later stated on many occasions that he never really considered the nuclear option during Operation Desert Storm. However, for all intents and purposes, Saddam got the message that the US would, indeed, hit Iraq with nuclear weapons if he were to fire chemical weapons toward the allied coalition forces - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Israel.

Clinton continued this practice of letting the adversaries know that the United States would consider a nuclear retaliatory response, both legitimate and proper, if its own forces or its allies came under a chemical or biological attack.

In that sense, the current administration's signaling of its intent regarding a nuclear retaliatory response may not be significantly different from the preceding one, except that Bush's NPR - in tandem with his shrill post-September 11 rhetoric to the community of nations regarding his war on terrorism, his open-ended resolve to fight terrorism in different regions of the world, and his intermittent signaling to the world that he is determined to topple Saddam - appears ominous.

It is possible that Bush's harsh rhetoric is also in response to the news that al-Qaeda was earnestly seeking to acquire the technique to manufacture the so-called "dirty bomb" - radioactive material wrapped in conventional explosives. That very potential raises the specter that, in a military conflict with the United States, a desperate Iraq, Syria or Libya would also attempt to use the dirty bomb against US forces or against its regional allies.

However, in order for any of these three countries to be able to use a dirty bomb, they would first have to acquire it. In the post-September 11 strategic environment, the success of the three countries - or that of any other country - to manufacture a dirty bomb no longer falls in the realm of impossibility, given that no one really knows how much of the highly enriched uranium (HEU) or spent fuel from the Russian inventory has already been acquired by one or more nations of the Middle East.

As the threat of the dirty bomb magnifies in the coming months and years, the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a retaliatory response might be increasingly viewed by all nuclear powers - not just by the United States alone - as a realistic option. The worst curse of the post-September 11 era might be that nuclear weapons are no longer viewed as weapons of last resort.

Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is a Norfolk, Virginia, US-based strategic analyst.

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