While many commentators have focused on the headline-grabbing element in President Obama's nuclear policy - the fanciful and unrealistic goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons around the world - a more subtle debate is unfolding within the administration about how America talks about its weapons:
Some leading Democrats, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have asked Mr. Obama to declare that the â??sole purposeâ? of the countryâ??s nuclear arsenal is to deter nuclear attack. â??Weâ??re under considerable pressure on this one within our own party,â? one of Mr. Obamaâ??s national security advisers said recently.But inside the Pentagon and among many officials in the White House, Mr. Obama has been urged to retain more ambiguous wording â?? declaring that deterring nuclear attack is the primary purpose of the American arsenal, not the only one. That would leave open the option of using nuclear weapons against foes that might threaten the United States with biological or chemical weapons or transfer nuclear material to terrorists.
I'm not a political scientist, but I'd be interested in hearing from some about just how effective a "declaratory policy" really is when it comes to the kind of scenarios envisioned above. We know that no state has transferred WMD to a terrorist organization for the purpose of surreptitiously striking another country. I think you could make the case that the U.S. should retain the right to use nuclear weapons against a state that facilitated a nuclear strike against the United States, but against the use of chemical or biological weapons? That just seems like, if you'll excuse the phrase, overkill.
