Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gozur88 3296 days ago
https://www.armscontrol.org/print/1184

>The strategy suggests that the United States might retaliate with a nuclear strike in response to a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack on the United States, U.S. troops, or friends and allies. “The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force—including through resort to all our options—to the use of WMD,” the strategy warns. Previous administrations have made similar statements at various times despite a long-standing policy not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states unless they attack the United States in alliance with a nuclear-weapon state.

>Neither the threat to act pre-emptively nor to possibly react to a chemical or biological attack with nuclear weapons are novel, but the Bush administration has more openly and frequently discussed these options than its predecessors and has now set them out as official policy.

Sure, that's not the same thing as saying "we will definitely nuke you if you gas us", but you're never going to see something like that in writing because it removes the option of not doing it.

1 comments

Right, you've just reaffirmed what the parent poster said.

The US reserves the right to use it's nuclear weapons in this way. But in no way is this the unique, most important, or most manifest reservation of nuclear force. Nor is the US bound by policy that it will respond to WMDs this way.

This passage says "We don't rule it out."

It's not accurate to round that up to a representation of policy. The parent responded to this characterization quite well.