Policy is a dangerous return to anxieties of the Cold War

Thanks to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, we now know much more about the contents of the Bush administration's secret "Nuclear Posture Review." But it's not a pretty sight. In essence, America's undue fascination with dropping the bomb on somebody became further unhinged in the wake of Sept. 11. Which is bad news indeed. For, as Joseph Gerson wrote before Sept. 11, "on more than 20 occasions since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and at least 5 times since the end of the Cold War, U.S. presidents have prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war during international crises and wars."
Notwithstanding the Bush administration's comforting public statements about reducing our nuclear arsenal, we now know that the President and the Pentagon are taking steps to be able to explode nuclear weapons: (1) against targets impervious to conventional weapons, (2) in retaliation for an attack using nuclear, biological or chemical weapons and (3) "in the event of surprising military developments." Seven countries - China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Syria - have been listed as potential recipients of such explosions.