Apocalypse Never

6. Intentional Use: The Nuclear Legacy of George W. Bush

96 Chapter 6 Intentional Use The Nuclear Legacy of George W. Bush A nuclear terror attack, executed by a non-state actor, is one terrifying scenario by which an actual nuclear detonation might take place. An accidental nuclear launch or even an accidental nuclear war, from the potent nuclear arsenal of a state, is another. And an international political confrontation between nuclear-armed states spinning wildly out of control, and escalating from nuclear crisis to nuclear war, is another still. This chapter explores a fourth scenario: a government’s conscious employment of nuclear weapons. Unlike the previous three scenarios, this one has already occurred. The U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the result of rational decision, not a rash, ill-considered, heat-of-the-moment act. And someday the leadership of another nuclear state may make a similar decision, concluding, not from fear and panic but after a sober, calm, detached cost-benefit analysis that they ought to start a nuclear war. Which state, in recent years, has seemed most likely to make such a decision? You only get one guess. Because the administration of George W. Bush, throughout its tenure, publicly contemplated and codified both new nuclear weapons development plans and a new nuclear war fighting doctrine that proffered just that possibility. The administration announced its radical shift away from traditional American nuclear doctrines in several documents that received astonishingly little public comment or attention: the “Nuclear Posture Review” (NPR) of December 2001, the “National Security Presidential Directive 14” of June 2002, the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” of September 2002 (with a revised version released in March 2006), the “National Security Presidential Directive 17” of September 2002, the CH006.qxd 2/4/10 11:00 AM Page 96 Intentional Use 97 “National Security Strategy to Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction” of December 2002, the “Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy” signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in 2004, and the “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” of September 2005. These documents insisted that American national interests might require American nuclear first strikes and maintained that the United States must be prepared to initiate nuclear war. They articulated several new scenarios in which American nuclear weapons might be employed in new military situations, and even identified seven particular states as possible targets of a nuclear first strike. Several books have already comprehensively reviewed Bush’s nuclear legacy, including James Wirtz’s Nuclear Transformation: The New U.S. Nuclear Doctrine, Amy Woolf’s U.S. Nuclear Weapons: Changes in Policy and Force Structure, and Steven Weinberg’s Glory and Terror: The Growing Nuclear Danger, all of which elaborately describe and analyze his administration’s nuclear weapons policies, especially the landmark “Nuclear Posture Review” of December 2001.1 Jonathan Schell’s The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, goes even further.2 Schell emphasizes just how great a departure Bush’s nuclear policies were from those that precariously evaded nuclear catastrophe during the first half century of the nuclear age. He examines the administration’s efforts to modernize nuclear weapons, its doctrine of preventive war (including the possible first use of American nuclear weapons), and its pursuit of a military hegemony spanning the whole planet. Schell makes the case that these policies, on balance, enhanced the likelihood of continuous nuclear proliferation, and eventual nuclear catastrophe. But we must briefly examine the nuclear weapons policy record of George W. Bush here because the nuclear weapons employment doctrines promulgated by the previous administration do, indeed, constitute a fourth scenario for nuclear weapons use. They show how tempting it was for policy analysts to conclude that launching nuclear weapons might be a rational policy option. And they suggest how easy it might be for other defense planners, in the years to come, in the United States or elsewhere, to arrive at the same conclusion again. As long as the human race holds on to nuclear weapons, the possibility will persist that someone, someday, will soberly conclude that good things will result from their use. CH006.qxd 2/4/10 11:00 AM Page 97 A p o c a l y p s e N e v e r 98 Perpetual Possession In 2005 Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University published a book boldly insisting that we can eradicate extreme poverty from the face of the earth by 2025.3 During his 2000 presidential...