LA Times:
The Nuclear Option in Iraq
By William M. Arkin.
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."..........................
Nuclear weapons have, since they were first created, been part of the arsenal discussed by war planners. But the Bush administration's decision to actively plan for possible preemptive use of such weapons, especially as so-called bunker busters, against Iraq represents a significant lowering of the nuclear threshold. It rewrites the ground rules of nuclear combat in the name of fighting terrorism.
It also moves nuclear weapons out of their long-established special category and lumps them in with all the other military options -- from psychological warfare, covert operations and Special Forces to air power in all its other forms...............
Entrusting major policy reviews to tightly controlled, secret organizations inside the Pentagon is a hallmark of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's tenure. Doing so streamlines decision-making and encourages new thinking, advocates say.
But it also bypasses dissenters, many of whom are those in the armed services with the most knowledge and the deepest experience with the issues. The Bush inner circle is known to be a tight bunch, prone to "group think" about Iraq and uninterested in having its assumptions challenged. But there are opinions they need to hear. While most military officers seem to consider the likelihood of our using nuclear weapons in Iraq to be low, they worry about the increased importance placed on them and about the contradictions inherent in contemplating the use of nuclear weapons for the purpose of eliminating weapons of mass destruction..........
In May, Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 17, officially confirming the doctrine of preemptively thwarting any potential use of weapons of mass destruction.......
How great a change these steps represent are revealed in the fact that STRATCOM owes its existence to previous post-Cold War policymakers who considered it vital to erect a great firewall between nuclear and conventional forces.
Now, with almost no discussion inside the Pentagon or in public, Rumsfeld and the Bush White House are tearing that firewall down. Instead of separating nuclear and conventional weapons, Rumsfeld is merging them in one command structure........
The review called upon the military to develop "deliberate pre-planned and practiced missions" to attack WMD facilities, even if an enemy did not use nuclear weapons first against the United States or its allies.
According to STRATCOM documents and briefings, its newly created Theater Planning Activity has now taken on all aspects of assessing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons facilities worldwide. Planners have focused intelligence gathering and analysis on seven priority target nations (the "axis of evil" nations along with Syria, Libya, China and Russia) and have completed a detailed analysis of intelligence data available on all suspect sites. According to U.S. Central Command sources, a "Theater Nuclear Planning Document" for Iraq has been prepared for the administration and Central Command.
What worries many senior officials in the armed forces is not that the United States has a vast array of weapons or contingency plans for using them. The danger 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. While Pentagon leaders insist that does not mean they take nuclear weapons lightly, critics fear that removing the firewall and adding nuclear weapons to the normal option ladder makes their use more likely -- especially under a policy of preemption that says Washington alone will decide when to strike.
To make such a doctrine encompass nuclear weapons is to embrace a view that, sooner or later, will spread beyond the moral capitals of Washington and London to New Delhi and Islamabad, to Pyongyang and Baghdad, Beijing, Tel Aviv and to every nuclear nation of the future.
If that happens, the world will have become infinitely more dangerous than it was two years ago, when George W. Bush took the presidential oath of office.