Assessing the Nuclear Posture Review

The spread of nuclear weapons to potential U.S. adversaries raises important questions for U.S. nuclear strategy and foreign policy. During the Cold War, U.S. nuclear strategy was designed to meet the challenges posed by the Soviet Union, a superpower adversary that deployed an enormous nuclear arsenal and was viewed as a threat to vital U.S. interests. Today the United States faces a strikingly different security environment. A few regional adversaries have acquired or are attempting to acquire small numbers of nuclear weapons, as well as the ability to deliver these weapons at long and even intercontinental range. Many more countries have the capacity to produce chemical and biological weapons (CBW), and a number of potential U.S. adversaries may already have done so.1 This article focuses on a controversial dimension of U.S. nuclear strategy: the use of nuclear weapons to destroy or threaten to destroy a regional adversary’s capacity to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD).2 There is little disagreement that the United States should deter nuclear attacks by threatening to inoict unacceptably high costs with nuclear retaliation.3 But should it also plan to destroy with nuclear weapons an adversary’s nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and related facilities, either preemptively or in a retaliatory strike? The George W. Bush administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture