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."
According to multiple sources close to the process, the current planning focuses on two possible roles for nuclear weapons:
* attacking Iraqi facilities located so deep underground that they might be impervious to conventional explosives;
* thwarting Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction.
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.
For the United States to lower the nuclear threshold and break down the firewall separating nuclear weapons from everything else is unsettling for at least three reasons.
First, if the United States lowers the nuclear threshold -- even as a possibility -- it raises the likelihood that other nations will lower their own thresholds and employ nuclear weapons in situations where they simply need a stronger military punch. Until now, the United States has reserved nuclear weapons for retaliation against nuclear attacks or immediate threats to national survival, a standard tacitly but widely accepted around the world. If the president believes that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein poses that kind of danger to the United States, he has failed to convince the world -- and many U.S. citizens.
