US permits itself first-strike nuclear attack

I know that you all want to hear happy feel-good posts about my holidays, and normal service will be resumed shortly; but there is dirty work being done at a crossroads not far from your home town. Paul Craig Roberts has posted a worrying article on Anti-War:

With no US troops available [for fighting new wars in North Korea and Iran], the Bush administration is revamping US war doctrine to allow for "preventative nuclear attack." In short, the Bush administration is planning to make the US the first country in history to initiate war with nuclear weapons. The Pentagon document, "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations," calls for the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear adversaries in order "to ensure success of US and multinational operations."

(The document can be downloaded here.) The first quote is not verbatim, the phrase does not occur in the document. The meaning definitely does, it can be inferred from e.g. item (e) in the list mentioned below.

The second quote is from chapter 3, page 47, where it is item (f) of a bullet-pointed list of conditions under which field commanders may request the use of nuclear weapons. The following points are even more outrageous:

(g) To demonstrate US intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter adversary use of WMD.

(h) To respond to adversary-supplied WMD use by surrogates against US and multinational forces or civilian populations.

(g) means that the US is willing to use nuclear weapons before the enemy does, the infamous "first strike". This is a silent disavowal of the fifty-year theory of mutually-assured-destruction which underlay the arms race and the cold war: that neither side could use nuclear weapons because the other side would overwhelmingly retaliate. The new theory is apparently that the first side to use nuclear weapons will so intimidate the enemy that they throw their nukes away unused. Do you believe that? I don't.

The key word in (h) is "surrogates". This means that the US is prepared to drop a nuclear bomb on <pick a country> if another airplane crashes into the Pentagon. Presumably they are worried that the world thought less of them because they didn't nuke Afghanistan after 9/11. (Never mind that the terrorists and their supporters/trainers/moneybaggers were all from Saudi Arabia, we can't bomb the oil. Think what that would do to Haliburton's profits!)

Taken together they mean that neither the Pentagon nor the White House has yet understood that terrorists are not soldiers. They are not sponsored by a nation-state, nor are they responsible to any nation-state, nor can their actions be steered by any nation-state. The only authority they recognize is Allah, and He is unlikely to weigh in on our side. (Even if He did, it wouldn't help: the Koran is definitive, perfect and complete - it says so in the Koran - and therefore anyone claiming to have heard a newer Word is a blasphemer and must be killed.)