This is the first of two dispatches on ways in which the foreign policy and military fundamentalists of the Bush administration are smashing through previously unthinkable boundaries. In a chilling piece in today’s Los Angeles Times, military analyst William Arkin describes how Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has broken down a “firewall” between nuclear and other commands within the military in order to break through a conceptual “firewall” between nuclear and other weapons of war. “The danger,” Arkin writes, “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.” Such weapons are, he reveals, being readied as just another “option,” however extreme, on a “ladder of options” in an Iraq war. (I”ve also included an LA Times news report on Arkin’s revelations.)
As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s long been a dream of nuclear strategists to incorporate nuclear weapons, which are really weapons of global extermination — in theological terms, you might say, they are the endtime of weaponry — into the American arsenal as just another set of usable tools on the battlefield. The creation of atomic landmines, artillery shells, and the like was in the 1950s and 1960s evidence of this. Nonetheless, as we all know, between August 9, 1945, and the early 1990s, nothing nuclear ever actually made it into use on a battlefield, despite consideration of the possibility during the Korean and Vietnam wars.
In the 1990s, however, the military managed to slip radioactive weaponry onto the battlefield for the first time since Nagasaki in the form of “depleted uranium” tank shells and missiles (which on impact create a radioactive dust whose “life” is evidently measured in the billions of years). The crossing of this nuclear threshold in the first Gulf War, again in Kosovo, and more recently in Afghanistan went almost unnoticed. That “depleted,” after all, sounds so modest. Now, however, this administration has larger fish to fry. They have an urge to loose a regime of proliferation — and proliferation wars — on the world. This is, of course, a form of madness.
What’s particularly frightening about such planning is what could happen if things go wrong in one of those proliferation wars. We already know what happened when things went wrong on September 11, as the President flitted around the country by plane and the Vice-president ducked. What if the “cakewalk” in Iraq turns into something else, or CBW weapons, if they exist, are indeed used against American troops, or a major terrorist incident occurs, or the unknown, which has plagued planners since time immemorial, strikes? These are men who, when feeling in control, have been ready to think the unthinkable at many levels. What might they do in a panic? Tom
The Nuclear Option in Iraq
The U.S. has lowered the bar for using the ultimate weapon
By William M. Arkin
The Los Angeles Times
January 26 2003WASHINGTON — 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.”
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.
William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion.
U.S. Weighs Tactical Nuclear Strike on Iraq
For what one defense analyst says is a worst-case scenario, planners are studying the use of atomic bombs on deeply buried targets.
By Paul Richter
The Los Angeles Times
January 25 2003WASHINGTON — As the Pentagon continues a highly visible buildup of troops and weapons in the Persian Gulf, it is also quietly preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons in a war against Iraq, according to a report by a defense analyst.
Although they consider such a strike unlikely, military planners have been actively studying lists of potential targets and considering options, including the possible use of so-called bunker-buster nuclear weapons against deeply buried military targets, says analyst William M. Arkin, who writes a regular column on defense matters for The Times.
Military officials have been focusing their planning on the use of tactical nuclear arms in retaliation for a strike by the Iraqis with chemical or biological weapons, or to preempt one, Arkin says. His report, based on interviews and a review of official documents, appears in a column that will be published in The Times on Sunday.