Thanks for the personal insight, side, sounds quite the experience .. below, bits from a couple of links re USA, Bush pre-emptive war and nuclear ..
Executive Intelligence Review .. This article appears in the May 27, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. U.S. Nuclear First Strike Doctrine .. Is Operational by Jeffrey Steinberg
The Bush Administration has quietly put into place contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons in pre-emptive attacks on at least two countries—Iran and North Korea. Confirmation of the new "global strike" plan appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday, May 15, in a column by William Arkin, a former Army Intelligence analyst. EIR has interviewed several senior U.S. intelligence officials, who have confirmed the essential features of Arkin's report. They link the accelerated drive to prepare for offensive nuclear strikes against Iran and North Korea to the failure of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the dismal results of the use of "shock and awe" massive conventional bombings against Afghanistan and Iraq. [...]
The source cautioned that the Bush Administration's new global strike plans are premised on the "fantasy" that you can develop a limited nuclear weapons capability that will not radioactively contaminate the area and kill large numbers of people. His final indictment of the new Bush Administration pre-emptive nuclear war doctrine was that, ultimately, when you talk about targeting North Korea, which is the number one target for a possible Bush Administration pre-emptive nuclear strike, you are really talking about war with China.
CONPLAN 8022
The Arkin story in the May 15 Washington Post, which has been picked up by news outlets around the world, offered a chronology of the recent steps taken by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on the road to pre-emptive nuclear war. This updated a EIR timeline of the Bush-Cheney Administration's drive to pre-emptive nuclear war, which was published on March 7, 2003, and is reprinted below. That original story tagged John Bolton as a pivotal player in the drive to end a quarter-century American policy of no first nuclear strike against any non-nuclear power. It traced the origins of the pre-emptive nuclear war policy to the early 1990s and then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who launched a plan to include "mini-nukes" in the conventional arsenal. [...]
Arkin traced the Global Strike schema to a January 2003 classified Presidential Directive, in which President Bush defined a "full-spectrum" global strike as "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives." Along the way, the Strategic Command (Stratcom), headquartered at Offert Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, which formerly had been exclusively responsible for America's nuclear weapons triad, was merged with the Space Command, and given responsibility for global operations involving both nuclear and conventional weapons.
Already, the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, for the first time, had codified the doctrine of pre-emptive war [..]
Arkin warned that "This blurring of the nuclear/conventional line, wittingly or unwittingly, could heighten the risk that the nuclear option will be used." [...]
One of the most controversial issues arising from the new Bush-Cheney Global Strike plan effort surrounds the potential use of nuclear bunker busters. The Bush Administration has attempted, in every defense budget, to add funding for research and development of a new generation of mini-nuclear weapons. This year, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has asked for more than $8 million to continue research on Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) weapons. [...]
Beyond the issue of the persistent Bush-Cheney Administration push for more money for R&D on a new generation of bunker busters, it appears that bunker busters are already an integral part of the existing U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. [...]
So as to remove any ambiguity from the Bush-Cheney nuclear madness, on March 15, 2005, the Pentagon placed on its public website a draft version of Joint Publication 3-12, "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations." This 69-page report made clear that the Bush Administration has fully integrated nuclear weapons into the conventional war-fighting. The Executive Summary stated: "For many contingencies, existing and emerging conventional capabilities will meet anticipated requirements; however, some contingencies will remain where the most appropriate response may include the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. [...]
For 25 years, up to the inauguration of George W. Bush, U.S. policy was that there would be no American first-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear armed states. George Shultz, Dick Cheney, John Bolton and company have fulfilled their impulse to hold the world hostage to unilateral nuclear weapons use in the hands of a President who shows increasing signs of madness. http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3221conplan_8022.html
Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan .. Strategy Includes Preemptive Use Against Banned Weapons By Walter Pincus .. Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, September 11, 2005
The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would update rules and procedures governing use of nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy first announced by the Bush White House in December 2002. The strategy was outlined in more detail at the time in classified national security directives.
At a White House briefing that year, a spokesman said the United States would "respond with overwhelming force" to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, its forces or allies, and said "all options" would be available to the president.
The draft, dated March 15, would provide authoritative guidance for commanders to request presidential approval for using nuclear weapons, and represents the Pentagon's first attempt to revise procedures to reflect the Bush preemption doctrine. A previous version, completed in 1995 during the Clinton administration, contains no mention of using nuclear weapons preemptively or specifically against threats from weapons of mass destruction. [...]
The draft document also envisions the use of atomic weapons for "attacks on adversary installations including WMD, deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons."
But Congress last year halted funding of a study to determine the viability of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator warhead (RNEP) -- commonly called the bunker buster -- that the Pentagon has said is needed to attack hardened, deeply buried weapons sites. [...] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/10/AR2005091001053.html
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