Military Options: Three Ethical Dilemmas 2

By Lisa Beyer

Suppose an American offensive against Iraq bogged down in a bloody stalemate, and Saddam turned his chemical or bacteriological weapons against American troops with devastating effect. Might the U.S. then use nuclear weapons in retaliation and to shorten the war?

No, say Pentagon planners. Publicly, U.S. officials have refused to rule out going nuclear. "We'd prefer to keep Saddam guessing," says an Administration source. But Washington decided early in the confrontation with Iraq not to supply nuclear weapons to the ground troops in Saudi Arabia. Nearly 400 ! nuclear warheads are thought to be aboard American ships in the gulf region. Using them, however, would yield no military advantage that would come anywhere near offsetting the horrendous political fallout.

For 45 years the U.S. has tried to convince the rest of the world that its dropping of the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an aberration. What's more, the linchpin in Washington's strategy to limit the spread of atomic weapons is a formal promise never to use them against a non- nuclear-armed state. If the U.S. violates its own policy to nuke Iraq, which by all indications does not yet have the Bomb, other countries might rush to develop atomic arms and possibly to use them. At the same time, revulsion over America's use of the ultimate weapon -- once again against a non-Western people -- would probably shatter the alliance against Saddam.

And what would America gain? Nothing to speak of. Advanced non-nuclear weapons such as fuel-air bombs and cluster bombs can do virtually as much damage to battlefield targets as nukes would. The only sites a nuclear device could eliminate more effectively are cities, for instance Baghdad or Basra. Today's city-aimed missile would not necessarily pack the wallop of Little Boy, the 12.5-kiloton A-bomb that fell on Hiroshima. But even a 2-kiloton package would kill thousands of civilians, violating the most basic rule of war: non-combatants are not fair game.

Similar arguments apply to a retaliatory use of chemical weapons. Though being ripped apart by shrapnel is a horrible way to die, the prospect of an agonizing death from nerve gas is somehow more frightening. Unlike explosives, chemicals can drift into civilian areas. If the U.S. were to unholster these weapons, it would have a hard time continuing its campaign to ban them altogether after the war. And like nukes, there is nothing chemicals can achieve militarily that cannot be accomplished with more acceptable arms.

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame/Washington and Gavin Scott/Chicago