In the greatest shift in strategic defensive thinking ever, President Obama declared yesterday that he would not use nuclear weapons in retaliation for an attack on the US. Read it here.
Mr. Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.
It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. 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. “I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” he said in the interview in the Oval Office.
So, let me see if I have this straight: If China attacks us with dirty weapons, or biological weapons, or shuts the country down in a massive cyberattack, we will take "graded response to this"? How will that be decided? Will it out of fear to retaliate at all? Might our enemies not figure this out and be emboldened to attack?
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