Stardate 20030128.0001

(Captain's log): Yet another of those response letters that I got done with and decided to post instead. Dennis writes:

This is an ongoing debate I have been having with friends. I say we will go to war. They say, that Saddam Hussein will say that he has agents in major US cities and will threaten to unleash biological weapons in our cities if we attack. In light of you pointing out that, in spite of many prime opportunities, nothing has happened, I don't think this is a plausible scenario. I also think we would have to call his bluff. Your thoughts?

Your friends better pray that Iraq doesn't do anything like that, because if Iraq does, US doctrine is to respond with saturation nuclear strikes. Our doctrine is that there is no difference between biological, chemical and nuclear weapons for purposes of calculating escalation, and if anyone uses chemical or biological weapons against us then we would not consider a nuclear response to be "first use".

The reason for that is pretty straight forward: we're trying to set up a massive deterrent so that such a thing never happens.

We've always had a "respond in kind" policy about that kind of thing and it's served us well. I've written about how we used such a policy in WWII to prevent the Germans from using chemical weapons against us even in the dire last stages of the war. They had nerve gas and we didn't, but we had mustard gas which was plenty bad, and we had B-17's and B-24's capable of delivering chemical attacks on Germany's cities. We actually had mustard gas in Europe ready to be used at short notice if need be, and the Germans knew it and absolutely believed we'd use it in response to German chemical first use. So they didn't do so. (And that's why the V2's launched at London had high explosive warheads and not warheads loaded with Sarin.)

Our doctrine in such cases is "massive overwhelming retaliation in kind". If Germany had used chemical weapons even once, anywhere, we would have responded with saturation mustard gas strikes on Germany's cities, to continue for the remainder of the war. And they knew it and weren't willing to take that risk.

The threatened response has to be a massive escalation so as to create the maximum deterrent. That's because there's no defense against such weapons, so the only way to keep yourself safe from them is to convince your opponent who possesses them to not use them against you. One way to do that is to buy him off or to surrender to him, but we don't do that kind of thing.

Our way to convince him is by threatening him with an even worse fate if he does attack us that way. It's part of the same doctrine as "Mutually Assured Destruction" which prevented use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It's not just that we will respond proportionally in kind, but that we will respond maximally, with everything we have. In the Cold War, American doctrine was that if the Soviet Union used even one nuke against us, we'd respond with every missile and bomber we had in a fullscale attempt to destroy them. And the attack plan was deliberately constructed to cause as many deaths as possible especially among civilians, and to cause as much destruction as possible, especially on non-military targets. The purpose of the plan was to make the resulting destruction as horrible as it could possibly be. The point was precisely to make the consequences of even one nuke too terrible to contemplate, so that there was the maximum unwillingness by the Soviet Union to chance it.

In fact, it was not just doctrine to respond that way to use of a single nuke. It was our doctrine to launch a fullscale attack even if use of a nuke was threatened.

And it worked, too. There was no nuclear war, and there were no attempts at nuclear blackmail that I've ever heard of.

That policy is still in place. But it's been generalized a bit, with all of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons grouped together for purposes of retaliation. The US developed a doctrine of saturation nuclear strikes in response to use of chemical or biological weapons mostly because it meant we could sign certain international arms control treaties banning chemical and biological weapons. All our bioweapons have been destroyed, and most of our chemical weapons are gone (and the rest will be gone soon). So we can't respond to a chemical attack against us now with chemical weapons of our own, or a biological attack with biological weapons of our own. But to prevent the use of such weapons against us, we still need to have the threat of intolerable destruction against those using such weapons.

Which is why current American doctrine includes the possibility of saturation nuclear counter strike in such cases. If they attack us in just one city with one release of biological weapons and we have a strong suspicion that it was them, we nonetheless respond by attacking everything they have, with the deliberate goal of causing as much death and destruction as we possibly can. And we don't have to have proof, and we don't care about the UN, and we're not interested in "plausible deniability". At least on paper, if Iraq were to use biological weapons against us or even threaten to do so we would respond by nuking every city in Iraq.

But that's not what I think we'd actually do in such a case. If Saddam threatens us with such a biological attack, he would be told that if such a thing act