Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2003

WHY THE PRE-EMPTIVE FIRST STRIKES MAY WELL BE NUCLEAR

               United States: the Strangelove doctrine
     ___________________________________________________________

   Mention nuclear proliferation and people think of North Korea or Iran: But what about the United States? The Bush administration plans to use nuclear weapons even against countries without
them. It also intends to enrich its massive arsenal with new  high-precision bombs.

                        By Pascal Boniface
     ___________________________________________________________

     THE United States Strategic Command, which is in charge of the    US nuclear arsenal, held a high-security meeting at a
     base in Nebraska in August to plan for the purchase of a new
     generation of nuclear weapons. More than 150 high-level
     specialists took part, among them members of the US
     administration, directors of the three main US nuclear
     laboratories (Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore),
     high-ranking Air Force and Strategic Command officers,
     industrialists and business specialists. However,
     Congressional observers were kept out (1).

     The aim of this exclusive brainstorming was to diversify the
     nuclear options available to US planners. The idea is to
     stock up on high-precision but low-intensity weapons, capable
     of penetrating deep underground to destroy bunkers and
     shelters. The Pentagon no longer limits itself to listing the
     missiles and bombers possessed by foreign countries that pose
     a threat to US security. It has gone so far as to draw up a
     list of 70 countries equipped with a total of more than 1,400
     missile command posts or underground weapons of mass
     destruction installations (2). Those it considers dictators,
     hidden away in their bunkers, have given US defence chiefs a
     cold sweat. The crux of the problem is the reduction of the
     collateral damage that attacks on such sites might cause.

     So the US army is looking for a new kind of weapon that will
     "contribute to our ability to prevent attacks by deterring
     them", as Keith Payne puts it. He was Deputy Assistant
     Secretary of Defence until May 2003; then he joined a
     thinktank, the National Institute for Public Policy. He
     believes that weapons of this kind could deter potential
     enemies from building underground installations but says:
     "It's not worth the investment" (3).

     This would be the first time the expansion of one country's
     arsenal stalled the military efforts of its official enemies.
     We know from strategic history that this hasn't happened
     before. When one country accelerates its weapons programmes,
     especially if, like the US, it is seen as being aggressive
     against the weak, its potential adversaries necessarily make
     efforts to catch up or find a way around the threat.

     Other US defence chiefs share Payne's opinions. Pentagon
     spokesman Michael Shavers suggests that the US deal with
     emerging threats. Paul Robinson, director of the Sandia
     laboratory, says the US would have more chance of deterring
     attacks from adversaries if the distinction between nuclear
     and conventional weapons became more blurred. He says the US
     should consider "combin ations of conventional and/or nuclear
     attacks for pre-emption or retaliation" (4).

     We are a long way from President George Bush's statement -
     that the US needed unilaterally to reduce its nuclear arsenal
     - on 23 May 2000 during his election campaign, when he said
     "these unneeded weapons are the expensive relics of dead
     conflicts" (5). Partisans of weapons control, who have fallen
     from favour in Washington, have good reason to be worried,
     while US nuclear laboratories, which not long ago feared they
     would have to cut back programmes, anti cipate good times.
     This nuclear strategy is not surprising. It follows from
     developments already under way. As early as September 1996
     Bill Clinton signed a presidential directive revoking the
     commitment made in 1978 not to use nuclear weapons against
     countries that did not possess any.

     In January 2002 the Secretary of State for Defence, Donald
     Rumsfeld, submitted a nuclear posture review to Congress. The
     idea of strategically developing a renewal plan for the US
     arsenal was already central. The document said that the US
     now had to face a wider variety of dangers from different
     horizons, not always foreseeable. The Pentagon felt that that
     the existing arsenal did not include precise enough weapons:
     the arms the US possessed, though extremely powerful, were
     insufficiently capable of penetrating underground. Hence the
     need for new weapons to destroy deep-level bunkers while
     limiting collateral damage. The report cited 1,400
     subterranean targets. Conventional weapons were felt to have
     insufficient penetration to destroy these. To guarantee the
     longevity of long-range weapons as well as producing new
     nuclear warheads, it might be necessary to resume nuclear
     testing.

     Stripped of their Soviet adversary, Pentagon chiefs were
     desperately looking for a replacement enemy to justify the
     continuation of their programmes. The review listed seven
     countries against which new-generation tactical nuclear
     weapons could be used: Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, North
     Korea, Libya and Syria (6).

     The conclusion of Jonathan Schell, a leading disarmament
     lawyer (7), was that "the new Bush policy clearly announces
     that the true prevention of proliferation is not to be any
     treaty but American attack" (8). This strategy is deeply
     worrying. It is a radical switch from the classic theory of
     deterrent towards a strategy of nuclear weapons use, based on
     rapidity and surprise. It will be a further challenge to the
     already ailing disarmament process. And it effectively
     promotes nuclear proliferation. The temptation to see nuclear
     weapons as being like any other, and therefore to use them,
     is not new. From the start, there were two rival views. Those
     who favoured the political approach insisted on the radical
     difference between conventional and nuclear weapons, which
     would supposedly frighten the adversary so much that they
     would never have to be used. Others presented nuclear weapons
     as military tools more effective than others, and did not
     rule out using them.

     During the 1950s President Dwight Eisenhower's team counted
     on the US nuclear capacity to compensate for the Soviets'
     larger conventional arsenal. Nuclear weapons were supposed to
     give you "a bigger bang for less bucks" (9). The graduated
     response strategy adopted in the 1960s followed the same
     line: it made explicit plans for the use of tactical nuclear
     weapons on the battlefield. The same was true of the neutron
     bomb project (ultimately abandoned) in the 1980s. US
     strategic thought has always mixed political and military
     approaches to nuclear weapons. But never, until now, has the
     US proposed to pull the nuclear trigger not just first, but
     without prior provocation.

     What is a deterrent? An explicit threat to use nuclear
     weapons that would cause irreversible damage, to deter a
     potential adversary from resorting to any military attack,
     including one by conventional weapons. Seeming prepared to be
     the first to use nuclear weapons is essential to any credible
     deterrent. That is why supporters of the deterrent strategy
     reject the no first use position, which makes nuclear weapons
     a deterrent only to other nuclear weapons. The US and France
     both considered their deterrent good even against a
     conventional attack by the Soviets.

     But it was different when it came to non-nuclear states. From
     1978 the US was committed not to use nuclear weapons against
     countries that did not have any. The five official nuclear
     powers (10) solemnly confirmed this commitment in 1994, when
     they extended the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 26 years
     after its original signing. This was a concession to
     non-nuclear states in exchange for renouncing all nuclear
     weapons programmes. The US is implicitly reneging on this
     commitment.

     Even more alarmingly this new strategic doctrine provides for
     the US to use nuclear weapons not only against a country with
     no nuclear capacity, but against one that has not attacked
     the US at all. To do this, the US would merely have to
     declare a preventive action, outside the legal parameters of
     self-defence, against a country it claimed to suspect of
     wanting to interfere with US security. Those in favour of the
     change in doctrine say that the war in Iraq would have been
     faster and smoother if the US could have killed Saddam
     Hussein in his bunker at the start of the conflict, using
     high-precision nuclear weapons. They had already put forward
     this argument after the first Gulf war in 1990-91 (11). By
     openly breaking the taboo that separated nuclear weapons
     (which have not been used since 1945 because of their
     apocalyptic nature) from conventional ones, these Doctor
     Strangeloves risk facilitating their use. Do they hope to
     resolve the complex situation in the Middle East with
     mini-bombs? You don't have to be a strategy specialist to
     balk at that. Not to mention the risk of targeting errors.

     On 6 August 2003, commemorating the 58th anniversary of the
     bombing of Hiroshima, the city's mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba,
     declared that the NPT was about to collapse, not because of
     North Korea's aggressive stance, but because of the US
     nuclear policy (12). Washington's plans would mean the end of
     a 10-year ban on development of weapons of less than five
     kilotonnes. It appears that the US dream is a policy of
     pre-emptive nuclear strikes, the atomic equivalent of the
     pre-emptive self-defence seen in the war on Iraq.

     Will the development of the new generation of weapons means
     the end of the moratorium on nuclear testing that the US
     announced in 1992? For the moment it is out of the question.
     Though Washington did not ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear
     Test Ban Treaty concluded in 1995, it did make a unilateral
     commitment to respect it.

     In May 2002 the US promised Russia that it would reduce the
     number of active nuclear warheads in its possession from
     6,000 to about 2,000. This was a sham promise: the US
     military retained the right to keep 10,000 warheads in stock,
     which could be reactivated in a matter of days if needed
     (13). For an inventor of arms control, Washington is
     remarkably stubborn in its rejection of any kind of
     negotiated disarmament.

     Arms control was the result of the strategically
     destabilising and financially ruinous effects of the arms
     race in the 1960s and 1970s. The idea was not to stop the
     race, but to control it bilaterally. The arsenals of the two
     superpowers continued to expand until the end of the 1980s,
     but at a much lower rate. At the start of the 1990s arms
     control became disarmament: commitments were made for the
     removal of intermediate-range nuclear forces, reductions in
     the main arsenals (SALT had given way to START, with
     reduction replacing limitation (14)), a total ban on chemical
     weapons and a reduction of conventional forces in Europe.

     This momentum was lost in the second half of the 1990s, with
     the rejection of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,
     the repeal of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (after
     it had survived all the vicissitudes of East-West
     confrontation), and the rejection of the treaty banning mines
     and the compliance protocol for the biological and toxin
     weapons convention. The extremely unilateral US is trying to
     retreat from its existing commitments (to which other
     countries are expected to adhere) and refusing to sign up to
     any new ones (which other countries are expected to honour).
     This is disarmament no longer negotiated, but imposed upon
     the weak as though they were the defeated party in a
     conflict.

     The US, like the rest of the international community, has
     always turned a blind eye to Israel's nuclear programme,
     which is not a potential capacity but a present threat. After
     pressuring India and Pakistan not to develop nuclear weapons,
     and increasing pressure after their tests in 1998, the US has
     now accepted de facto their status as nuclear powers. We
     should note that all three countries stayed out of the NPT
     and are not in breach of any legal obligations.

     The US plans, far from finishing proliferation, risk
     restarting it. Potential nuclear states can conclude from the
     new strategy, and from the Iraq war, that it is better to
     have a capacity to respond harmfully to attack than to adhere
     to commitments outlawing WMD, if you want to stay out of the
     firing line of the US. North Korea, which officially admits
     to having nuclear weapons and refuses any kind of
     international control, is being treated diplomatically by the
     US. But we know what happened to Iraq, which denied having
     nuclear weapons and accepted unlimited verification of its
     statements. The seventh review conference of the NPT,
     scheduled for 2005, could be stormier than usual.
       ________________________________________________________

     Pascal Boniface is head of the Institut de relations
     internationales et stratégiques (IRIS), Paris, and author of
     La France Contre L'Empire, (Robert Laffont, Paris, 2003)

     (1) Julian Borger, "Dr Strangeloves meet to plan a new era",
     The Guardian, London, 7 August 2003.

     (2) William J Broad, "US presses program for new atom bombs",
     International Herald Tribune, Paris, 4 August 2003.

     (3) International Herald Tribune, 4 August 2003.

     (4) The Guardian, 7 August 2003.

     (5) Speech to the National Press Club.

     (6) Barthélemy Courmont, "Une nouvelle doctrine nucléaire
     américaine?", Défense nationale, Paris, July 2001.

     (7) Author of the disturbing 1982 classic The Fate of the
     Earth, reprinted by Stanford University Press, 2000.

     (8) "Disarmament wars", The Nation, New York, 25 February
     2002.(Subscribers only)

     (9) See Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy,
     Macmillan, London, 1987.

     (10) United States, Russia, France, Great Britain, China.

     (11) See Boniface, Contre le révisionnisme nucléaire,
     Ellipses, Paris, 1994.

     (12) "Is Bush readying a first strike strategy?",
     International Herald Tribune, 18 August 2003.

     (13) Georges Le Guelte, "Une nouvelle posture américaine:
     révolution dans les concepts stratégiques?", Revue
     internationale et stratégique, Paris, n°47, Autumn 2002.

     (14) The SALT agreements signed by the US and the USSR in
     1972 and 1979 authorised further development, but with
     limits. The START agreements, 1991 and 1993, imposed a real
     reduction in the arsenals of both countries, from 13,000 to
     6,000 warheads.

                                                                 

                                      Translated by Gulliver Cragg


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