New U.S. Strategic Doctrine Maintains “Nuclear Ambiguity”

As Anglo-American officials continue to throw out baseless allegations that President Putin is threatening to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the U.S. is changing its strategic posture in preparation to fight a nuclear war. The release on Oct. 27 of the Defense Department’s 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) document shows the intent to engage in permanent warfare. It is centered around the idea of an “integrated deterrent”, which is described as “working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our networks of Alliances and partnerships.”

Toward this end, Defense Secretary Austin writes in his introduction that for the first time, the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and the Missile Defense Review are included in the NDS “in an integrated way, ensuring tight linkages between our strategy and our resources.” He then states that this will allow the U.S. to “sustain and strengthen our deterrence”, aimed primarily at China, which he calls the “pacing challenge” for the U.S., and Russia for its “reckless” and “irresponsible behavior” in Ukraine.

Including the NPR is of particular note, as it presents a change in U.S. policy regarding the first use of nuclear weapons. According to nuclear disarmament expert Scott Ritter, the language in the report leaves the issue of when the United States might use nuclear weapons deliberately ambiguous, including the possibility that the U.S. might launch a preemptive nuclear attack in response to a non-nuclear incident — thus significantly lowering the threshold for nuclear war. Schiller Institute chairwoman Helga Zepp LaRouche described this specific shift in U.S. policy, which began under the George W. Bush administration but is more explicit in this report, as a sign of insanity, as it represents the commitment to engage in permanent warfare in defense of the collapsing unipolar order, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons.

The same day the new NDS was released, an article was published in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, titled “Could America Win a New World War? What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia”. The author, Thomas Mahnken, calls for massive military upgrades to allow the United States to wage war simultaneously against both China in the Pacific and Russia in Eastern Europe.

Then, on Nov. 3, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard issued a chilling war cry, arguing that the United States needs to undertake a major mobilization comparable to what was done to get to the Moon by 1969 (!) – in order to produce new nuclear warfare capabilities, to deal with China. Calling the present war in Ukraine “just the warmup,” he said, “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [for] a long time. We have to do some rapid, fundamental change in the way we approach the defense of this nation….”