Trump’s nuclear strategy includes responding fiercely to cyberattacks
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration outlined sweeping changes in U.S. nuclear strategy Friday, calling for two new types of nuclear weapons and warning for the first time that in “extreme circumstances” the U.S. could use nuclear weapons in response to nonnuclear attacks on infrastructure and civilians.
The strategy, described in a 75-page review released by the Pentagon, constitutes one of the most significant revisions of U.S. nuclear strategy since the Cold War, one aimed at aggressively countering nuclear-armed Russia and North Korea as well as terrorist groups seeking to acquire nuclear arms.
Though the strategy continues much of the previous administration’s nuclear weapons policy, it effectively ends Obama-era efforts to reduce the size and scope of the U.S. arsenal and minimize the role of nukes in defense planning.
It also takes a more aggressive stance toward Russia.
By clarifying potential scenarios when the president might authorize a nuclear attack, officials said, the U.S. was seeking to deter adversaries from conducting large-scale cyber warfare and other non-nuclear but potentially devastating attacks on the U.S. and its allies, a controversial idea that critics said could make nuclear war more likely.
“We must look reality in the eye and see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a statement accompanying the report. “Given the range of potential adversaries, their capabilities and strategic objectives, this review calls for a flexible, tailored nuclear deterrent strategy.”
“In no way does this approach lower the nuclear threshold,” Mr. Mattis wrote. “Rather, by convincing adversaries that even limited use of nuclear weapons will be more costly than they can tolerate, it in fact raises that threshold.”
But Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks reductions in the nuclear arsenal, said the new strategy — combined with President Donald Trump’s volatile approach to international threats — could lower the threshold for employing nuclear weapons.
“This strategy gives him a massive rebuild of the current Cold War arsenal, complete with new missions and new weapons, to include responding to a cyberattack with a nuclear bomb,” Mr. Cirincione said. “This plan, coupled with this president, greatly increases the risk of nuclear war.”
The Obama administration sought to shrink the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strategy, hinging its policy on what the former president called a moral obligation for the United States to lead by example in ridding the world of nuclear weapons. It declared in 2010 that it would consider using nuclear weapons only in extreme circumstances, such as a massive conventional attack by a nuclear armed state or in the event of a mass-casualty chemical or biological attack.
Mr. Trump’s strategy likewise calls for using nuclear weapons only “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies and partners.”
But it specifies that extreme circumstances also could include “non-nuclear strategic attacks” including those on the “U.S., allied or partner civilian population or infrastructure.”