----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, January 01, 2001 12:39 AM Subject: fwd_BUSH'S NUCLEAR DOCTRINE: FROM MAD TO NUTS? [STOPNATO.ORG.UK] STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com/links/joinlb ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Nuclear Unilateralism".... Peace and Happy New Year to all from Kev. ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*** BUSH'S NUCLEAR DOCTRINE: FROM MAD TO NUTS? *** By William D. Hartung Foreign policy issues were mostly an afterthought during the 2000 presidential campaign, and they continue to take a back seat in President-elect George W. Bush's discussions of the priorities of his incoming administration. But one critical foreign policy issue--U.S. nuclear weapons policy--demands immediate attention and debate. The Bush foreign policy team is quietly contemplating radical changes in U.S. strategy that could set off a global nuclear arms race that will make the U.S.-Soviet competition of the cold war period look tame by comparison. In his only significant public pronouncement on the subject, delivered last spring, Bush put forward a schizophrenic view of the nuclear conundrum. On the positive side, he spoke of making unilateral cuts in U.S. nuclear forces and taking those forces off of hair-trigger alert. He even implied that the cold war doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD--the doctrine that spurred the U.S. and the Soviet Union to build thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons as a way of ensuring that neither side would dare attack the other for fear of being annihilated in return) was a "dead relic" of a bygone era. On the negative side of the ledger, Bush endorsed the deployment of a massive missile defense program on the scale of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" plan, complete with interceptor missiles based on land, at sea, in the air, and in outer space. The seeming contradiction in the Bush view--taking reassuring steps by reducing the size of the U.S. arsenal and taking forces off alert on the one hand, while provoking other nuclear powers with a massive Star Wars program on the other--disappears if you look at the common thread uniting these proposals: nuclear unilateralism. Spurred on by the ideological rantings of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, a powerful bloc within the Republican Party has increasingly come to treat negotiated arms control arrangements--like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I and II), and the proposed Comprehensive Test Ban treaty--as obstacles to U.S. supremacy rather than guarantors of a fragile but critical level of stability in the nuclear age. The right-wing rallying cry is "peace through strength, not peace through paper." If that means shredding two decades of international arms control agreements (most of which were negotiated by Republican presidents), so be it. This unilateralist approach to nuclear strategy is a disaster waiting to happen. Bush advisers like Stephen Hadley have suggested that the U.S. can significantly reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons in its current arsenal of 8,000 to 10,000 strategic warheads. Simultaneously, the U.S. would need to modernize the force by developing low-yield nuclear weapons that could be used for missions like destroying hardened underground command centers or hidden weapons facilities. The barely concealed premise of this emerging nuclear doctrine is a desire to make U.S. nuclear weapons more usable. This dubious proposition is grounded in the notion that a low-yield weapon could more readily be used as a threat, or actually dropped on a target, without sparking nuclear retaliation by another nuclear power. Some conservative analysts have even suggested that low-yield nukes are a "humanitarian" weapon, claiming that they can be used to take out underground biological warfare laboratories, for example, with less loss of life than would result from other approaches to destroying such facilities! Of course, in the unfortunate event of a nuclear exchange prompted by a U.S. threat to use "mini-nukes," the Bush doctrine would trust in our spiffy new Star Wars system to protect us. The fact that such as system is far from reality and may never successfully be built does not seem to cool the passions of the new generation of nuclear use theorists (or NUTs, as some critics have called them). (William D. Hartung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is the president's fellow at the World Policy Institute at New School University and a military affairs adviser to Foreign Policy in Focus.)
