The Australian March 16, 2002
Experts fear US nuclear attack
By Roy Eccleston
THE US is preparing to slash its Cold War nuclear arsenal, but some military experts fear the shock of September 11 and a new Pentagon military strategy have increased the prospects of the US launching a nuclear attack.
And the potential target list is long: Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan and India, at least.
"Not since the early 1980s and the administration of Ronald Reagan has a US president placed such high priority on nuclear weapons," argued Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
The Bush administration is reversing "an almost two-decade-long trend of relegating nuclear weapons to the category of weapons-of-last-resort," warned William Arkin, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University school of advanced international studies in Washington.
"If another country were planning to develop a new nuclear weapon and contemplating pre-emptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state," blasted The New York Times.
The cloud of claim and counter-claim began to mushroom last weekend after a leak, first in The Los Angeles Times, of the classified version of the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review, a document setting out the direction for the nuclear arsenal over the next decade.
At first blush, the review sounds like a big improvement from the Cold War strategy of Mr Reagan, who wanted the US to be able to fight and win a nuclear war. It envisaged cuts of about two-thirds of active warheads, down to about 1700-2200, as promised by Mr Bush.
It also saw a greater reliance on conventional weapons and defences - mainly, the missile defence system, still being developed.
But the public version of the review did speak ominously of the potential for terrorists or rogue states to arm themselves with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons to threaten the US or its friends. It just didn't say what the US might do about it.
The answer was in the leaked classified report. First, it flagged the need for smaller nuclear bombs with less fallout designed to penetrate underground bunkers in which command centres, or stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons might be held.
Second, and most controversially, it urged contingency plans for strikes on Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya, as well as nuclear powers China and Russia. It also alluded to Pakistan and India, saying a "sudden regime change" in an existing nuclear power could also require a nuclear response.
What concerned experts such as Mr Arkin was that the strategy sought to integrate conventional forces and weapons into a nuclear war plan that envisaged smaller bombs - all of which made their use more likely.
Quizzed on the leaked document, Mr Bush followed the script and said he wanted "all options on the table" to ensure no country threatened the US with weapons of mass destruction.
"Bush said nothing Bill Clinton wouldn't have said," said Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton national security council adviser, now at the Brookings Institution.
Where Mr Daalder saw danger was in the review's attempt "to remove the dividing line between nuclear and conventional weapons", and treat them as just bigger bombs.
Joe Cirincione, a nuclear policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the review envisaged the reintroduction of tactical nuclear weapons in attacks on weapons or control bunkers would "absolutely" make the use of nuclear bombs more likely.
It would also encourage nations such as India or Israel to consider new weapons and new uses for them, thereby diminishing US national security, he said.
Michael Levi, director of the strategic security project at the Federation of American Scientists, was sceptical of the idea of bunker-busting bombs, saying they could not be small, and would throw up more intense, more deadly fallout over a smaller area.
The real concern, argued another Clinton national security adviser, Jim Lindsay, was that the US and Russia, in cutting their nuclear arsenals by about two thirds, intended keeping the dismantled warheads in storage.
Excerpts of the classified review were yesterday posted on globalsecurity.org.
© The Australian
