Nuclear weapons: experts alarmed by new
Pentagon 'war-fighting' doctrine
US joint
chiefs of staff posted then removed paper that suggests nuclear weapons could
‘create conditions for decisive results’
Julian Borger in Washington
Wed 19 Jun
2019 14.21 EDT
North
Korean ballistic missiles. The document said nuclear weapons could ‘create
conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability’.
Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images
The Pentagon believes using nuclear weapons could “create conditions
for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability”, according to
a new nuclear doctrine adopted by the US joint chiefs of staff last week.
The document, entitled Nuclear
Operations, was published on 11 June, and was the first such
doctrine paper for 14 years. Arms control experts say it marks a shift in US
military thinking towards the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war –
which they believe is a highly dangerous mindset.
“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive
results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the joint chiefs’ document
says. “Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the
scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail
in conflict.”
At the start of a chapter on nuclear planning and targeting, the
document quotes a cold war theorist, Herman Kahn, as saying: “My guess is that
nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their
use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and
unconstrained.”
Kahn was a controversial figure. He argued that a nuclear war
could be “winnable” and is reported to have provided part of the inspiration
for Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove.
The Nuclear Operations document was taken down from the Pentagon
online site after a week, and is now only available through a restricted access
electronic library. But before it was withdrawn it was downloaded by Steven
Aftergood, who directs the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.
A spokesman for the joint chiefs of staff said the document was
removed from the publicly accessible defence department website “because it was
determined that this publication, as is with other joint staff publications,
should be for official use only”.
In an emailed statement the spokesman did not say why the
document was on the public website for the first week after publication.
Aftergood said the new document “is very much conceived as a
war-fighting doctrine – not simply a deterrence doctrine, and that’s
unsettling”.
He pointed out that, as an operational document by the joint
chiefs rather than a policy documents, its role is to plan for worst-case
scenarios. But Aftergood added: “That kind of thinking itself can be hazardous.
It can make that sort of eventuality more likely instead of deterring it.”
Alexandra Bell, a former state department arms control official
said: “This seems to be another instance of this administration being both
tone-deaf and disorganised.”
Bell, now senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control
and Non-Proliferation, added: “Posting a document about nuclear operations and
then promptly deleting it shows a lack of messaging discipline and a lack of
strategy. Further, at a time of rising nuclear tensions, casually postulating
about the potential upsides of a nuclear attack is obtuse in the extreme.”
The doctrine has been published in the wake of the Trump
administration’s withdrawal from two nuclear agreements: the 2015 joint comprehensive programme of action with
Iran, and the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty
with Russia. The administration is also sceptical about a third: the New Start
accord that limits US and Russian forces strategic nuclear weapons and delivery
systems, which is due to expire in 2021.
Trump is creating a nuclear
threat worse than the cold war
Simon Tisdall
Meanwhile, the US and Russia are engaged in multibillion-dollar
nuclear weapon modernisation programmes. As part of the US programme, the Trump
administration is developing a low-yield ballistic missile, which arms control
advocates have said risks lowering the nuclear threshold, making conceivable
that a nuclear war could be “limited”, rather than inevitably lead to a global
cataclysm.
The last nuclear operations doctrine, published during the
George W Bush administration in 2005, also caused
alarm. It envisaged pre-emptive nuclear strikes and the use of the
US nuclear arsenal against all weapons of mass destruction, not just nuclear.
The Obama administration did not publish a nuclear operations
doctrine but in its 2010 nuclear posture review it sought to downgrade the role
of nuclear weapons in US
military planning.
It renounced the Bush-era plan to build nuclear “bunker-buster”
bombs, and ruled out nuclear attack against non-nuclear-weapon states, but it
did not go as far towards disarmament as arms control activists had wanted or
expected.
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