The creeping nuclear threat


	April 6, 2002	atimes.com

Front

COMMENT
The creeping nuclear threat
By Ehsan Ahrari

The increasingly militant face of America's foreign policy since September 11 is a horrific development. Watching President George W Bush rightly expressing his anger over the scourge of global terrorism is one thing, but then watching him lower the nuclear threshold in his recently leaked Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is an entirely different matter.

Even when one does not categorically reject the statement of the Bush officials that the NPR does not represent a policy, but only contingency planning, one wonders whether such contingency planning is only the product of the wild imagination of mid-level Pentagon staffers, or whether it really reflects the thinking of higher-level government officials.

Mary McGrory, in her column "Nuts about nukes" (Washington Post, March 14), makes an excellent point that most military men do not think of "battlefield nukes" as an option. She goes on to quote a statement by Bush's Secretary of State Colin Powell in his autobiography, My American Journey, that is worth repeating. Powell was "disparagingly" narrating his experience of 1958, when he was assigned to guard a nuclear cannon. Regarding that experience, he wrote, "We are not talking about dropping a few artillery shells at a crossing. No matter how small they were ... we would be crossing a threshold ... using nukes at this point would mean one of the most significant policy and military decisions since Hiroshima." Now the same Powell is defending his president's NPR, by stating that the United States does not plan to use nuclear weapons.

But there is also a dispatch of the Los Angeles Times of March 9 that reports, "Pentagon officials have said publicly that they were studying the need to develop theater nuclear weapons" for use against specific targets on a battlefield. At least in the thinking of US officials, the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons in future wars is becoming much less than the "unthinkable" option that the late Herman Kahn used to talk about.

But the most objectionable part of Bush's NPR is that it includes countries on its nuclear target list that are nonnuclear states and signatories of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty - Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The United States, the Soviet Union and Britain pledged in 1978 not to use nuclear weapons against such states - a pledge that is generally referred to as "negative security" assurance. The only exception was that such states should not be part of an attack in alliance with a nuclear weapon state. The People's Republic of China and France became parties to that pledge in 1995.

However, that negative security assurance was violated by the United States prior to the initiation of Desert Storm in 1991, when president George H W Bush conveyed to Saddam Hussein of Iraq that if he were to use chemical weapons against the US-led international coalition of forces, his administration would consider "the strongest possible response". Even though Bush Senior has clarified many times since then that he never seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons during the Gulf War of 1991, it seemed that the nuclear threshold was tacitly lowered without any hue and cry from the friends or foes of the United States.

Only the Indians made a public note of this reality, when India's Defense Minister George Fernandes is reported to have observed that if you want to tangle with the United States, make sure that you have nuclear weapons.

The conventional wisdom within the US governmental and foreign-policy elite circles was that in the wake of a chemical-biological attack from an adversary, the potential use of nuclear weapons was indeed an option. Since the global environment was heavily clouded with uncertainty after the end of the Cold War, even the US Congress did not assert its foreign policy prerogative of participating in a decision of the magnitude of lowering the nuclear threshold. It appeared that the purposeful ambiguity related to the nuclear threshold was to put fear into the "bad guys" such as Saddam and Kim Jong-il of North Korea. Since the Russians and the Chinese were also actively proliferating nuclear and missile technologies to countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, there was not going to be a critical examination of the rationale underlying that purposeful ambiguity.

The post-September 11 developments took the genie of that purposeful ambiguity out of the bottle. Numerous reports that al-Qaeda was actively seeking the techniques to make the "dirty bomb" - that al-Qaeda was very much interested in the subject of nuclear weapons, and that there is absolutely no credible assurance that the Russian fissile or radioactive material has not fallen into the wrong hands - cumulatively created an environment within the US decision-making circles that it's better to be safe than sorry. And that frame of mind seems to be behind the Bush administration's NPR, and every single item related to the potential use of nuclear weapons.

It seems that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) - the bedrock of nuclear competition during the Cold War years - if not shattered, has been turned on its head (it may also be stated that the MAD doctrine has gone "madder"). If the reports that al-Qaeda and such like groups are interested in the acquisition of techniques to make the "dirty bomb" are indeed true, then it is only reasonable (if not logical) to conclude that all nuclear capable states - five nuclear weapons states plus India, Pakistan, and Israel - may not have much of a choice but to develop and deploy tactical nuclear weapons, purely as a defensive mechanism. The most worrisome development (indeed the curse) of the post-September 11 era is that the use of tactical nukes has entered so casually into international public debates.

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

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