It means that the U.S. reserves the right to retaliate with nukes.
'Course, jjimm, your question is a silly one. WMDs are not handed out to soldiers along with their rifles and canteens. Authorization to pull them out of storage and use them would come at a considerably higher level.
Sua
Which brings up an interesting conundrum. If it can be established that Iraq really did hand off a load of VX to al-Qaeda, and they manage to use it against the United States, to whom will the American response be directed?
And if I can get even more speculative, what if the Iraqi VX is delivered by al-Qaeda operatives via a North Korean SCUD? What if the SCUD is set up and launched from, say, a Mexican beach? Or a Liberian-registered ship anchored in Cuban territorial waters?
Who then gets to bask in the warm glow of the “overwhelming” American response?
The point of asymmetric warfare is to attack your enemy while guaranteeing a diluted and hopefully ineffective response. I think the confluence of news items in the past couple of days is part of an American attempt to tack culpability on enemies we can hit for the actions of organizations which we cannot hit.
If it really comes down to the possibility of raining nuclear death on an enemy-by-proxy, I guess we’ll see if we’re up to it.
Ryan, neither of your links works. For future reference–when you’re talking about a news item, not only should you include a link to the story itself, but also Copy and Paste a paragraph or two, so that if your link doesn’t work and the rest of us have to go looking for your story, we have something to go on. Searching the Guardian’s website for “bush iraq”…well…
I finally looked under “strategy” and went through a couple pages of hits.
So here it is.
Even if it’s just the title, or the author, it helps. 
This “right” is spelled out where, exactly?
I think that Bush was indirectly trying to imply that he would use nukes (or at least not rule them out) and I think that it’s irresponsible for him to leave that implication out there if he truly has no intent to use them.
If he DOES intend to use them, then he is just an evil fuck beyond all description.
I am sure that the US will use nuclear weapons if the attack against us or our allies is severe enough. Of course it would have to be a pretty severe attack which I doubt Iraq is capable of making at the present time WMD not withstanding.
From what I understood of the US policy from talking heads and ‘hints’ from people like Baker and Carter and representatives of almost all US administrations is the following.
[ul]
[li]The US’ implied policy is that any use of WMD against the US or her interest is retaliation in kind.[/li][li]Since the US WMD arsenal only includes nukes, then we retaliate with nukes.[/li][/ul]
Now I can’t find a specific cite to back up my assertion. But if our spoken policy is deterence, then that would be the best way to use the arsenal. Imply that we would use them and we consider all WMD the same.
At least, that is one thing the deterrence is meant to enforce: high level and rigorous control of WMDs. The US doesn’t want Iraq handing them out to al Queda reps, and wants Iraq to know they will be held accountable if they do. Here’s hoping Saddam keeps tight control of his weapons.
I understand your concerns, but I’m talking about a game with stakes so high that all you mention become secondary considerations. Looking through a hypothetical third-party lens, as it were.
Should war commence between U.S. and Iraq (and I won’t be certain of that until it actually transpires), we can only hope it doesn’t escalate to nuclear war. Seems to me that conventional weaponry should win the day, and thus preserve the oil that seems to be the driving force behind all of this.
A very significant problem (that I think should be made VERY public) is that the US military doesn’t do chemical or biological weapons well, either delivering them or receiving them. The US military is ill-equipped and ill-trained to handle any sort bio or chem attack, and even less well equipped to respond directly in kind (e.g., with bio or chem).
If bio or chem weapons are used on US troops, many US troops will die, and homeland outrage will rise to near unanimity, and unanimity of the American people is a very bad thing for everyone.
The US will be moved to resort to the only WMD they know and use well: Nukes.
The threat is no good if everyone knows you won’t go through with it if push comes to shove, and if the threat is no good, you invite pushes and shoves. Such is the difficulty of deterrence theory.
Because the US is so bad at handling the BC part of NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) weapons, and because the Soviet Union was perceived by the US to be very good at handling at least the C part of that equation, and since the US expected to be hit by C in any invasion of Europe by the USSR, the US has always stated very clearly that it reserved the option to use nuclear weapons first, especially tactical nukes to slow the “advancing hordes” of Soviet troops who could operate more efficiently in chemical wartime environments…at least that’s the way things were looked at during the Cold War. The point is, the US has always been a first strike kind of country when it comes to nukes, so this is not really news, except to the extent that it points out that the fears of the Cold War can be renewed at any time.
There may be some “no first use” policy when it comes to B and C weapons, but since the US really isn’t equipped or trained to do that in any meaningful way, it is a de facto condition as much as it is a stated policy.
I share yojimbo’s exasperation with this post as a first thought of anyone when considering this issue. And yet, I thought I would try to answer the question.
Yes, the “fallout” (in the literal and figurative sense) from nukes can be managed to some extent with precise targeting, proportionate warhead-to-target magnitudes, and air bursts (as opposed to ground bursts which tend to throw a lot of radioactive dirt into the sky to be carried into neighboring areas).
Even given that, will a lot of innocent people die (and oil fields be contaminated) if nukes are used? Most likely.
I’m sure glad I don’t have to personally perform the mental deterrence gymnastics which involves thinking like this: “I’m willing, but I won’t have to and I hope I don’t have to, but again, I will, but maybe not really if I can just convince you I will…”
The bottom line, do we want men at the button who are willing to push it? Yes we do, because if we do, they likely won’t have to push it, and if we don’t, we may wish some day that we had them once upon a time so that they wouldn’t have had to push it by virtue of their being willing to push it.
The UN Charter — the right to self-defense and all that.
What Bush did was say precisely what the U.S.'s position has been for the past 50+ years, that the policy of the United States is to respond to an attack with WMD with a counterattack with WMD.
I know that it’s been twelve years, but don’t any of you remember Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) - the cornerstone of USSR-US relations through the Cold War? Both sides threatened massive retaliation if the other used nukes; the result was that neither side used nukes.
Sua
Using nukes to counter whatever low grade chemical or biological strikes that Iraq might be able to muster (and thus far we have absolutely no evidence that Iraq even possesses such capability) is not “self-defense,” it is genocidal vengence. IMO, ANY use of nukes on innocent people EVER for ANY reason is evil. There simply is no conceivable moral justification to do it.
How about just using really big non-nuke-bombs then? Or a bunch of smaller non-nuke-bombs? Is your objection to the nuke part? Or to the innocent people being bombed? What if the nukes or non-nukes are used on battlefield troops engaged in combat?
You think we’d keep them around if we weren’t willing to use them?
Marc
So, if Saddam Hussein were lobbing nuclear ICBMs at New York, Washington, and Roseville, your response as president would be…nothing? If you believe that there is no conceivable moral justification for the use of WMD, what exactly SHOULD we do when and if Iraq uses them?
If you personally were Commander-in-Chief, would you feel you had to automatically capitulate to any nations willing to use WMD against your national interests?
I’m not sure what you mean by WMD or by “national interest,” but let me say this. I would not respond to ANYTHING with nukes, not even other nukes. If China launched ICBM’s at America, well then, that’s it for America. Nuking China wouldn’t save us, it would only be petty revenge, and it would slaughter millions of MORE innocent people. The moral imperative of a president in such a situation should be the preservation of as much of the human race as possible. A nuclear response would be strategically useless and morally bankrupt.
No evidence that Iraq has chemical weapons? Does the Iran-Iraq war ring any bells? Where were you when the pictures of the gassed Kurds, their own citizens, showed up in Newsweek and Time?
By the way, if a US Army division is hit with mustard gas, that doesn’t mean the US will automatically start lobbing ICBM’s over the north pole at major population centers. I would guess that any smaller, tactical nukes already in the theatre would be used first against any particularly attractive groupings of Iraqi military, and we’d move on from there as necessary. Not all nuclear weapons have city-class megatonnage.
These capabilities were all destroyed after the war, and the US has yet to find any evidence that Iraq has restored them.