March 2005: Military Issues Guidelines Giving Wide Latitude for Use of US Nuclear Weapons

The Joint Chiefs of Staff publish a classified draft document, the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, laying out the rationale for the US’s use of nuclear weapons. It includes the possibility that nuclear weapons could be used during preemptive assaults on nations (see January 10, 2003) or even non-national organizations such as al-Qaeda. The draft states that nuclear weapons can be used:
Against an adversary intending to use WMD against US, multinational, or allies’ forces or civilian populations;
In the event of an imminent attack by biological weapons that only nuclear weapons can safely destroy;
To attack deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons or the command and control infrastructure required for the adversary to execute a WMD attack against the United States or its allies;
To counter potentially overwhelming adversary conventional forces;
For rapid and favorable war termination on US terms;
To ensure the success of US and multinational operations.
In essence, the document gives a green light for the US military, as ordered by President Bush, to use nuclear weapons under almost any circumstances, against much less powerful adversaries. Author J. Peter Scoblic will write: “The Bush administration was blurring, if not erasing, the line between conventional and nuclear weapons and lowering the threshold at which the nation would go nuclear, proposing an array of tactical uses for weapons that were supposed to only be used in strategic conflicts. The Bush Pentagon was effectively acknowledging that the United States might use nuclear weapons first, against a nonnuclear state, before any hostilities had taken place.” The document actually replaced the term “nuclear war” with “conflict involving nuclear weapons” because the first phrase implies that both sides in a conflict were using nuclear weapons, and in all likelihood any nuclear weapons deployed under the conditions envisioned in the document would only be American. [Scoblic, 2008, pp. 180-181]