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Sources close to President Joe Biden said that he has refused to rule out using nuclear weapons first in certain circumstances.
Since the start of the Cold War the United States has had a nuclear doctrine that has reserved the right to use nuclear weapons first under “extreme circumstances,” but during his presidential campaign, Biden had vowed to change that.
He said he believed in the “sole purpose” doctrine, meaning that the United States would only use nuclear weapons in response to an attack and as a deterrent.
But he has been under pressure from NATO allies to change his stance on that since Russia invaded Ukraine and began saber-rattling about using nuclear weapons of its own, The Wall Street Journal reported.
President Biden, stepping back from a campaign vow, has embraced a longstanding U.S. approach of using the threat of a potential nuclear response to deter conventional and other nonnuclear dangers in addition to nuclear ones, U.S. officials said Thursday.
During the 2020 campaign Mr. Biden promised to work toward a policy in which the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal would be to deter or respond to an enemy nuclear attack.
Mr. Biden’s new decision, made earlier this week under pressure from allies, holds that the “fundamental role” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal will be to deter nuclear attacks. That carefully worded formulation, however, leaves open the possibility that nuclear weapons could also be used in “extreme circumstances” to deter enemy conventional, biological, chemical and possibly cyberattacks, said the officials.
The decision comes as Mr. Biden is meeting with allies in Europe in an effort to maintain a unified Western stance against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and allied concerns that the Kremlin might resort to nuclear or chemical weapons.
“Allies were concerned that moving too far away from current posture would leave them vulnerable—in theory or in practice—to Russian threats,” Jon Wolfsthal, who was the senior arms control and nonproliferation official for President Obama’s National Security Council, said.
The officials who spoke to The Journal said that the administration’s review is expected to lead to cuts in two nuclear systems the Trump administration embraced.
If agreed to by Congress, it would mean the end of a program to develop a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile and getting rid of the B83 thermonuclear bomb.
But the review does support modernizing the nuclear triad, which includes land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-based missiles, and bombers, at a cost of more than $1 trillion.
“The Biden administration ‘fundamental role’ phrase harks back to the Nuclear Posture Review conducted in 2010 during the Obama administration,” The Journal said.
“But it differs somewhat from the more specific language in the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, which underscored the role of nuclear weapons to ‘hedge against an uncertain future,” it said.
“That review spelled out that the threat of nuclear weapons could be used to deter what the Trump administration called ‘nonnuclear strategic attacks’ against U.S. or allied populations or infrastructure.
“That suggested that a major cyberattack, germ weapon or chemical attack that killed thousands of people could trigger a nuclear response,” it said.
In 2017, as he was set to leave his role as vice president, Biden spoke about his belief of a “sole purpose” doctrine.
“In our 2010 Nuclear Posture Review—we made a commitment to create the conditions by which the sole purpose of nuclear weapons would be to deter others from launching a nuclear attack,” he said.
“Given our non-nuclear capabilities and the nature of today’s threats—it’s hard to envision a plausible scenario in which the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States would be necessary. Or make sense,” he said.
His policy was even part of the Democrat party’s platform in 2020.
“Democrats believe that the sole purpose of our nuclear arsenal should be to deter—and, if necessary, retaliate against—a nuclear attack, and we will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military,” it said.