The Bush administration has threatened to respond with nuclear weapons to a nuclear, biological or chemical attack, in what was being seen yesterday as a clear warning to Saddam Hussein not to use his weapons of mass destruction in the event of a war.
The release of unclassified sections of a document called the National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction was intended as a conscious echo of a similar warning to the Iraqi leader issued by the then US secretary of state, James Baker, before the last Gulf war.
Analysts said yesterday that the new strategy was also meant to signal the administration’s readiness to use a new generation of small ”bunker-busting” nuclear weapons against underground targets sheltering enemy leaders and their weapons.
Critics of the policy, however, pointed out that in 1991 Mr Baker was implicitly offering President Saddam the chance to survive in power if he did not use poison gas or germ warfare against US troops. This time President Saddam would have no such incentive for restraint, since an invasion of Iraq would be aimed at toppling him.
The new document represents an elaboration of Mr Bush’s doctrine of pre-emption, declared in September. It stresses counter-proliferation (aggressive measures to stop the development and spread of banned weapons) over non-proliferation (the reliance on international treaties, which was a trademark of the Clinton administration).
The newly published strategy paper goes one step further than the September doctrine in issuing a blunt threat to any state or group planning to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the US.
”The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force — including through resort to all of our options — to the use of WMD against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies,” the document says.
The clarification that the US would use nuclear weapons in response to a biological or chemical attack, marks a break with the policy of deliberate ambiguity adopted by earlier administrations.
”This clearly is a shift,” said William Taylor, a retired colonel and military analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. ”It is a new era. It makes it much more explicit.”
Taylor said the document reflected intense work under way on the deployment of tactical low-yield nuclear bombs to destroy hardened underground shelters.
”We had no weapon in our arsenal before to deal with those kind of deep targets. Well, now we do,” Taylor said.
Lee Feinstein, a foreign policy strategist in the Clinton administration, described the new policy as a mistake which could ultimately undermine US credibility.
”This undercuts American strength by issuing a threat that it’s hard to imagine any administration carrying out,” said Feinstein, who is now an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank. ”It also enhances the currency of nuclear weapons and lowers the threshold to nuclear use.”
It also emerged yesterday that land mines were being stockpiled in US bases around the Gulf for potential use in a conflict with Iraq. Mark Hiznay, a mines expert at Human Rights Watch, estimated that there were now 90 000 anti-personnel mines ready for use in the region, and an unknown number of anti-tank mines.
Some of those mines have been stored in Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island owned by Britain, which, unlike the US, is a signatory to the treaty banning their use. Britain has argued this does not represent a breach, as the mines are not under its jurisdiction — a suggestion questioned by Hiznay.
”I don’t agree with that legal interpretation,” he said. ”At the moment the mines are on board boats. I have a bigger problem if they come on shore and get put on planes for delivery to Iraq. We’ve been trying to get the British to look at their interpretation and the reality, and ask, does this assist the US in using mines?” – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001