This is the gist of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review enacted by the Trump Administration according to two defense specialists. Writing an op-ed in the July 9 Washington Post, Scott Sagan, a professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and earlier, the special assistant to the Director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Allen Weiner, a professor at Stanford University who previously served as a career lawyer in the State Department, draw the dire implications of this drastic change of strategy in the U.S. nuclear posture. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/09/cyberattack-ransomware-nuclear-war/]
The authors write that the development of nuclear weapons introduced a new concept in what they call the “Law of Armed Conflict.” With the nuclear era, the issue of war and peace was suborned under the concept of deterrence, or Mutually Assured Destruction, whereby a country subject to a nuclear attack would, immediately upon detection, launch a retaliatory and totally destructive nuclear response. Both sides would be destroyed. Therefore, neither side would be inclined to launch a nuclear attack. And with the Soviet failure to move in the direction of a doctrine of Mutually Assured Survival through a collaborative or shared program of building a beam weapon defense against nuclear weapons, as formulated in the LaRouche-Reagan concept of Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), MAD is still the overriding doctrine.
But the notion has been seriously undermined with the threshold at which a nuclear strike would be launched significantly reduced. With the increased “encirclement” of Russia by NATO forces, a recent Russian national strategy doctrine calls for the use of nuclear weapons if the very existence of the nation is threatened, for instance, a multi-pronged NATO attack of such a magnitude that Russia forces could not repel. The Trump 2018 Nuclear Posture Review goes even further in calling for a nuclear response even under a serious attack with biological weapons or a crippling cyber attack. This has increased by several manifolds the danger of nuclear war, the authors declare.
