Nuclear War Danger

From: Bruce Podobnik <podobnik@lclark.edu>
To: World-Systems Network
Re: Article in New York Times relevant to discussion about
       Future Wars.

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February 5, 2000
Nuclear Anxieties in a New World
Reporter: Judith Miller
New York Times

Although the cold war is over, some arms control
analysts say that the threat of a nuclear war is actually
greater now. While Russia and the United States continue
to reduce their massive strategic nuclear arsenals -- from
4,700 each in 1992 to between 2,000 and 2,500 in 1998 --
the Kremlin's Security Council approved a disturbing
shift in military doctrine yesterday that increases Russia's
reliance on nuclear weapons.  Rather than threatening
to use nuclear weapons only "in case of a threat to
the existence of the Russian Federation," Russia now says
it will use them "if all other means of resolving the crisis
have been exhausted," an apparently lower threshold.
   Meanwhile, the Clinton administration says that at least
12 nations have acquired, or are trying to acquire, germ
weapons.  "The likelihood of a nuclear weapon being used
now is greater than at any time other since the Cuban
missile crisis," says Thomas Graham Jr. a former
high-ranking arms negotiator who heads the Lawyers
Alliance for World Security, a nonprofit arms control group
in Washington.
    While not all scholars agree with Mr. Graham's
particularly grim assessment, these developments have been
forcing arms control theorists to rethink some of the basic
precepts about how to operate in a world filled not just with
nuclear weapons, but with other means of mass destruction
as well. Should the United States, traditionally a champion
of agreements banning the use of such weapons, threaten to
use nuclear weapons to deter a devastating chemical or
biological attack on itself or its allies? If deterrence fails,
how should it respond? Would it punish a rogue state by
launching a nuclear attack?
   If the answers to such unsettling questions are not
obvious, they are not meant to be. For almost a decade,
America has relied on a doctrine called "calculated
ambiguity" about its nuclear intentions in such cases, or
what Michael Krepon, president of the Washington-based
Henry L. Stimson Center, calls "ominous ambiguity."
While the Clinton administration says that the ambiguity is
deliberate, at least some of it reflects a continuing lack of
consensus within the nuclear establishment about how and
when nuclear weapons should be used, despite a series of
major policy reviews by the administration.
   Janne E. Nolan, the director of international programs at
the Century Foundation, argues in "An Elusive Consensus,"
a slender volume published last year by the Brookings
Institution, that the nuclear world has dramatically changed
and that American nuclear doctrine has not kept up.  Since
the advent of the nuclear age, nuclear strategy has been
based on the premise that the only way to deter an attack is
to prepare for the use of nuclear weapons in war. Following
that logic, American military planners in the 1950's quickly
built a nuclear force capable of destroying 70 Soviet cities
with 133 low-yield bombs, says William M. Arkin, a
nuclear weapons analyst and co-author of "Nuclear
Battlefield" (published in 1985).
    By the mid-1950's, however, the thinking changed and
the ability to destroy all Soviet cities -- and have American
cities obliterated by Moscow -- was deemed insufficient to
guarantee deterrence. American theorists thus developed a
new strategic view that American nuclear weapons had to
be sufficient in number and variety to survive a surprise
attack. These doctrines of "counterforce" and "second
strike" fueled an explosion in numbers of warheads and
weapons during the cold war.
   After the Soviet Union collapsed, the Bush administration
reversed decades of history and announced in 1992 that it
was abandoning the concept of global war with the Soviet
Union as the organizing principle behind America's military
policy. As a result, said Ms. Nolan, Washington unilaterally
de-emphasized nuclear weapons and strengthened nuclear
deterrence by, among other things, taking strategic nuclear
bombers off alert, removing launch pins from long-range
nuclear missiles, removing tactical nuclear weapons from
Europe, and negotiating the Start II treaty with Moscow,
under which the number of long-range nuclear-tipped
missiles was reduced.  Ms. Nolan says the Clinton
administration, too, has made some progress in limiting the
spread of nuclear weapons and defusing the threat of
nuclear war, by helping some of the former Soviet republics
rid themselves of nuclear weapons and by winning support
for an extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
under which nations without nuclear weapons vow not to
acquire them in exchange for help with civilian nuclear
programs.
 But she also argues that the absence of presidential
leadership has allowed for doctrinal drift and paralysis as
deep-seated disagreements remain within the administration
over how the United States should respond to what is
essentially a new threat: the use of germ or chemical
weapons against the United States or its allies. A senior
State Department arms control official says that treaty
obligations legally prevent the United States from using
chemical or biological weapons to respond to a germ or
chemical attack.  That would seem to leave the United
States with no choice but to use conventional bombs or
nuclear weapons.
   Mr. Graham said the United States had historically
forsworn the use of nuclear weapons to deter any
non-nuclear threats. But during the Persian Gulf war, the
stated policy shifted. To dissuade Saddam Hussein from
using chemical weapons, President George Bush sent the
Iraqis a letter in 1991 warning that Washington was
prepared to use "all means available" to retaliate against
Iraq if it used such weapons. While memoirs by Mr. Bush,
James A. Baker 3rd, Secretary of State at the time, and
others subsequently stated that the United States would not
have actually used nuclear weapons against Iraq, the letter
was aimed at making him think the opposite. "We issued an
ambiguous threat that we hoped would work and it
apparently did," said Mr. Graham. "But our calcuated
ambiguity turned out to be a bluff. It won't be believed in
the future."
   The Clinton administration has followed a similar course.
Over the years, it has repudiated the use of nuclear weapons
in a growing number of cases, all the while facing pressure
to expand those commitments. For example, as part of an
effort in 1995 to get nations without nuclear weapons to
swear off acquiring them, the United States and four other
nuclear powers pledged never to use such weapons against
a treaty signatory -- unless they were attacked by a
nonnuclear treaty member allied with a nuclear state. There
was no exception for an attack that used biological or
chemical weapons.
   Nonetheless, the administration injected an element of
ambiguity into its policy in 1996 when it learned that Libya
was building an underground chemical installation. Citing a
little known rule of international law known as "belligerent
reprisal," which holds that a country can suspend its arms
control commitments if it is attacked by another country in
violation of international law, the administration warned
that it would not limit its retaliatory options if it was
attacked by chemical or germ weapons.  Mr. Graham says
that the belligerent reprisal doctrine has given the
administration the military flexibility the Pentagon
demanded in what was a fierce internal battle. But even this
"out," he warns, is limited. The doctrine requires that any
response to an attack be "proportionate" to the attack itself
and essential to prevent another attack. Given these
constraints, he concludes, a nuclear response to a germ or
chemical attack on America would almost never be legal or
justified in the world's eyes.
   How to resolve this quandary is still being quietly
debated. Last week the Washington-based Chemical and
Biological Arms Control Institute issued a report based on
the recommendations of some of the nation's leading
defense analysts -- including R. James Woolsey, a former
C.I.A. director; Robert B. Zoellick, a senior official in the
Reagan and Bush administrations and a foreign policy
adviser to the presidential aspirant George W. Bush; and
Ronald F. Lehmann II, a veteran defense official now at
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Although everyone agreed
that the threat of biological weapons was increasing, the
11-member group disagreed sharply about whether nuclear
weapons should have a role in retaliating against or
deterring a germ attack on the United States or its friends.
   Some panelists wanted Washington to declare explicitly
that the United States would not be the first to use a nuclear
weapon against a biological or chemical threat, arguing that
there were good conventional alternatives that would not
violate promises Washington has made to nonnuclear
nations or undercut treaties to limit the spread of nuclear
weapons. Others countered that the best way to deter
attacks was to keep all military options open. "It's obviously
one of the toughest issues -- the only issue on which even
a rough consensus was not possible," said Michael Moodie,
a former arms negotiator and the institute's president.
   The lack of a consensus on the wisdom of clarifying the
American position means that the current American policy
-- threatening an "absolutely overwhelming" and a
"devastating" response to an unconventional attack -- is
likely to continue. "Ambiguity suits everyone's purpose,"
said Philip Zelikow, a former White House official and
director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the
University of Virginia. "So does the absence of public
debate." In reality, one senior official said, doctrine matters
mainly to defense theorists. "It doesn't really matter what
your policy is. In the real world, you're going do what you
have to do."