The Donald Trump administration appears to be pursuing a new policy when it comes to using nuclear weapons, shifting from the traditional policy of deterrence to a plan for using nukes as attack weapons in warfare, a policy that could increase the chance of a nuclear war, according to experts quoted by The Guardian newspaper.
Since the 1960s, the U.S. has effectively practiced a policy of “mutually assured destruction,” according to The Atomic Archive , employing a nuclear arsenal only as a deterrent against the weapons’ use by other nuclear-armed countries, specifically the former Soviet Union.
In fact, however, the U.S., since the late 1940s, has reserved the right to a “first strike,” meaning that official policy gave the U.S. the ability to initiate a nuclear attack, according to The New York Times . President Barack Obama pushed to change the official policy to one that would prevent the U.S. from launching a “first strike,” but by the time Obama left office, the policy had not been altered.
But the new Trump policy appears to be even more aggressive, and is outlined in an official Pentagon report titled Nuclear Operations that was posted online by the Defense Department — then quickly deleted within one week of posting, and is now on a site restricted to Pentagon use only, according to the Federation of American Scientists .
The FAS, however, retained a copy of Nuclear Operations and continues to make the 60-page document accessible via FAS.org .
In one passage that experts found particularly alarming, the authors of the report, prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say that “using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability.”
Dr. Patricia Lewis, research director for international security at the British think tank Chatham House, said that the passage signals a major shift away from the Obama-era “defensive” nuclear weapons philosophy to an offensive approach that would allow Trump to order the use of nuclear weapons in battlefield combat, according to The Independent newspaper.
“That’s very disturbing, because where is the nuclear threat coming from?” Lewis said, quoted by the paper.
Steven Aftergood of the FAS told The Guardian that he found the new policy “unsettling” because the now-deleted document appears to outline “a war-fighting doctrine – not simply a deterrence doctrine.”
The document also quotes the late military strategist Herman Kahn, whose views on how to use nuclear weapons, according to Wired Magazine , inspired the classic 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , a dark comedy about nuclear conflict between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
In the Pentagon report, Kahn is quoted as saying, “nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained,” also advocating a “battlefield” approach to nuclear attacks.
