Not Just A Last Resort?(Preemptive Strike With a Nuclear Option; Iran/N. Korea)

Washington Post ^ | 05/15/05 | William Arkin

[TigerLikesRooster]

Not Just A Last Resort?

A Global Strike Plan, With a Nuclear Option

By William Arkin

Sunday, May 15, 2005; Page B01

Early last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea.

Two months later, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, told a reporter that his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had changed its way of operating so that it could be ready to carry out such missions. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an interview with the Shreveport (La.) Times. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes." Carlson said his forces were the U.S. Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike" and could execute an attack "in half a day or less."

In the secret world of military planning, global strike has become the term of art to describe a specific preemptive attack. When military officials refer to global strike, they stress its conventional elements. Surprisingly, however, global strike also includes a nuclear option, which runs counter to traditional U.S. notions about the defensive role of nuclear weapons.

[bitt]

'Which reminds me, anyone watching 24? The nuke is launched! but now I have to wait until next Sunday to see where it lands. It seems the bird is in the air due to hesitation on the part of leftist politics. Jack Bauer will save the day somehow I'm sure....'

They'll probably come up with a star wars defense system that nobody, not even the President, knew about, but Jack Bauer was active in it's production and knows the sequence codes, interception tables, and my Mama's address.....