In their latest installment aimed at exposing military secrets that they believe the American people have an obligation to know, secrecy experts William Arkin and Mark Ambinder provide more details on the “options” for using both nuclear and conventional weapons in U.S. Strategic Command’s Operational Plan 8010, the over 1,000-page plan for global war against Russia and China. According to Arkin and Ambinder, writing in an article published in Newsweek, with help from Hans Kristensen (director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists), the main feature of O-Plan 8010, is the full integration of nuclear and conventional capabilities, not only with each other, but also with cyber and space capabilities. This is all done in order to give the President a range of “options” to be used depending on the particulars of the conflict.
“In the new nuclear war plan, integration of all military and non-military weapons in the American armory is labeled the new deterrent,” they write. “Planners seek to debilitate and immobilize any enemy rather than physically destroy it. The dividing line between what is nuclear and what is conventional has been blurred more than ever. And with that, ‘strategic stability'—the singular objective of preventing the use of nuclear weapons, which has kept nuclear weapons sheathed for more than 75 years—has been made obsolete. Russia is not likely to invade Ukraine, but if a military confrontation unfolds, it would be the first test of this new approach to war.”
“The Biden administration is going to issue a ‘Nuclear Posture Review’ in the coming weeks that is expected to say very little,” Kristensen told Arkin and Ambinder. “As we await the Nuclear Posture Review, the irony is that nuclear weapons are now inseparable from the entire spectrum of strategic effects,” Kristensen says. Instead, he says, Washington needs to produce a “strategic posture review” that acknowledges these changes, and one that particularly examines whether all of these capabilities enhance strategic stability and peace or undermine it.
