In a dramatic departure from the strategic ambiguity that marked past nuclear doctrine, the Obama Administration has announced a new update of U.S. nuclear strategy. In this revision, the U.S. actually publicizes the kinds of attacks that would warrant an American nuclear response and those that would trigger only a conventional military counterattack. As this report in The New York Times puts it:
For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack. Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with “a series of graded options,” a combination of old and new conventional weapons.
Why the change? This analysis in The New York Times suggests that President Obama is reconfiguring U.S. nuclear strategy to deal with new non-state challenges as well as providing leverage to deal with rogue states:
The 50-page “Nuclear Posture Review” released on Tuesday acknowledged outright that “the massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the cold-war era” is “poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorist and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons.” […] Mr. Obama’s new strategy makes just about every nonnuclear state immune from any threat of nuclear retaliation by the United States. But it carves out an exception for Iran and North Korea, labeled “outliers” rather than the Bush-era moniker of “rogue states.” The wording was chosen, Mr. Obama’s senior advisers said, to suggest they have a path back to international respectability — and to de-targeting by the United States.
I appreciate that this new policy may further isolate Iran and North Korea in the eyes of the international community, but given that these two “outliers” were already facing an American nuclear response to any nuclear attack by them on the U.S. or our allies, I’m not sure they will appreciate the subtlety of the change. Before the new policy, they faced a nuclear counterattack. After the new policy, they face a nuclear counterattack. This extraordinary change is bound to have an immediate and profound impact on their behavior. I expect that the headlines will soon announce that both countries have abandoned their nuclear programs.
Perhaps this Pentagon video of the policy announcement will help clarify matters:
