Nuke ‘Em From Orbit

Before we get excited, two things:

1. Commissioning a study is a necessary but not nearly sufficient step toward preparing to use such weapons. DoD commissions all kinds of studies that fundamentally amount to intellectual exercises, rather than practical preparations.
2. US warfighting doctrine for most of the Cold War envisioned using tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Soviet conventional formations as they invaded Central Europe.

The most interesting story here may be about how tactical nukes find their way out of US warfighting plans.  In retrospect, the idea of using tactical nukes to wipe out forward Iraqi Army formations sounds absurd. At the time, US Army planners had included tactical nukes as a default assumption for defeating just that kind of formation.  The circumstances were much different, of course; we knew that the Soviets had nukes (and the Iraqis did not), we expected that the Soviets would use tactical nukes (which the Iraqis didn’t have), and we assessed Soviet forces as vastly more formidable than Iraqi. But it’s not obvious that these differences should have weighed so heavily against the use of such weapons against the Iraqis.

It’s also worth noting that the United States could have used tactical nuclear weapons against Iraqi forces under circumstances that were, more or less, compatible with the demands of the Law of Armed Conflict. Go ahead and drop 17 150 kt weapons on Iraq, along the border where elite Iraqi formations were deployed during the Gulf War, and you’ll find that it’s very easy to avoid killing any civilians, or causing significant damage to any civilian property of infrastructure. The question of whether using such weapons is disproportionate to the military advantage gained depends, at least to some extent, on an evaluation of the likely effectiveness of both US and Iraqi armored formations, which was open to some debate in early 1991.

To my mind, the fact that the US rejected the use of tactical nukes in warfighting in the early post-Cold War is the best evidence we have for the existence of the “nuclear taboo.”  We refrained from using nukes against deployed Iraqi forces in 1991 not because they wouldn’t have been useful, and not because they were inconceivable within existing US doctrine, but because of some combination of a) concerns over international response, and b) the idea that nuclear weapons were transgressive in a way that other extraordinarily advanced and lethal weapons systems were not. That Cheney appears to have led the way on conceptualizing the use of such weapons within the USG is probably a point in favor of this “transgressive” interpretation.