The Nuclear Option
It’s time to start thinking about ours, not just theirs.

November 29, 2001 12:00 p.m.

fter the Gulf War, Iraqi officials told us that they didn't dare consider using chemical weapons against U.S. troops, because President Bush had threatened massive retaliation for such an attack.

Actually, James Baker had reportedly told Tariq Aziz — the words are worth savoring — "If Iraq uses non-conventional weapons, the U.S. will respond massively and overwhelmingly in a manner from which it would take Iraq centuries to recover."

The Iraqis thought that meant nuclear retaliation. Silly them.

Former Bush administration officials — including the president himself — went on to say afterwards that they never would have considered such a thing.

Colin Powell in his memoir recounts telling Dick Cheney, after the then-secretary of defense asked him to explore nuclear options: "Let's not even think about nukes. You know we're not going to let that genie loose." (This is just another example of how Powell is incapable of thinking in anything other than clichés, but that's a topic for another day.)

As the war on terrorism develops, we may well wish that we had a credible nuclear threat again. A nuclear deterrent is of limited utility against truly stateless terrorists, but it could come in handy when confronting states that seek and possess weapons of mass destruction.

One lesson everyone learned from the Gulf War is that the way to keep a site safe from U.S. airpower is to dig really deep (bin Laden is applying this lesson in a crude way in his attempt to hide in caves, including perhaps the Tora Bora complex that proved resistant to conventional bombing during the war with the Soviets). Winston Churchill's bunker in London during World War II was about 10 feet deep. Rogue states are now digging hardened bunkers hundreds of feet deep.

Once you get far enough down, even our most fearsome bunker-busting conventional bomb isn't good enough to do the job. Only a nuke will do.

Nuclear weapons could be useful in other situations as well.

Let's say we have intelligence that says within a month Saddam will have a nuclear bomb that he can fit atop an ICBM, so that decapitating his regime immediately seems imperative (this is not such an outlandish scenario, since the consensus of elite opinion seems to be that we should wait to do something about Saddam until he is in exactly such a position). Shouldn't it at least be an option to give six hours' notice, then eliminate central Baghdad and all its underground facilities?

Both of these scenarios — taking out deeply buried weapons sites, decapitating a regime — have something in common: The warheads we stocked up on during the Cold War would be mostly inappropriate for the task. We have a wide mix of nuclear weapons: huge city busters, tactical nukes that are delivered by cruise missiles, etc.

But we still need one more: a truly deep-burrowing nuke designed to penetrate before sending its shock waves straight down into the earth, while minimizing fallout above ground. (A nuke in the current aresenal has been jerry-rigged — it's called the B61-11 — to try to suit this purpose, but probably is not adequate to the task.)

We should set about getting this "earth penetrator." President Bush could simultaneously breathe new life into the credibility of our nuclear option and create a potentially important new tool of U.S. power by announcing a crash program to develop and test a nuke appropriate to the new international environment.

Bush's current rap is that the U.S. will adopt a nuclear configuration that makes sense for us, regardless of the feelings of other countries and the strictures of outdated arms-control agreements. So what would be wrong with eliminating several thousand nuclear warheads and adding, say, 100 new, deep-burrowing warheads?

Of course, the chances of their use would be extremely slim. Even a small, deep-burrowing nuke would be a very blunt weapon — possibly violating the rules of war by unnecessarily killing noncombatants and creating nasty complications like radioactive clouds potentially floating across borders.

But even if it were never used, developing such a weapon would send an unmistakable message about America's seriousness and resolve, and put the nuclear option back in play in a way that otherwise might not be possible. It certainly might get the attention of Iraqi officials again — if not Saddam himself, then maybe some of his top generals.

There would, of course, be howls of protest if President Bush announced a program to develop a new nuke. But the biggest lesson of September 11 is that is a dangerous world and that we should always plan for the worst, even if that means ignoring polite conventional wisdom. Amid all the howls, the American people would be with the president, and — more importantly — the world would take notice.

Not Imperial Enough?
Bernard Lewis makes a very interesting point in the new NR. He argues that what the Arab states really want in the Mideast peace process is a more vigorous U.S. imperial role: A "misunderstanding affects the perception of and the desire for an American role as `honest broker' in Middle Eastern disputes, notably the Arab-Israel conflict. Here there is an important distinction to be made between the roles of facilitator and mediator. In the secret bilateral negotiations and agreements between President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel that preceded Sadat's public declaration, the King of Morocco and President Ceausescu of Romania rendered valuable services in arranging meetings and ensuring the necessary secrecy, but played no part in the actual peace process. Mediation is another matter. The role of mediator can be both honorable and useful, and the United States has, on occasion, rendered signal service to the warring parties. But on the whole they are likely to do better when they meet face to face, preferably in secret. With a superpower mediator, the parties will tend to negotiate with the mediator rather than with each other. This is specially relevant to the Israel-Palestine conflict, where the ultimate issue is the survival or destruction of a nation. Any arrangement short of this is seen as temporary and provisional. On the basic issue, clearly, there is no possibility of compromise or even of meaningful negotiation. In this context, the call for an American role can only mean a call for decision and enforcement — for a truly imperial role."