Is false advertising always bad? That certainly is not the case with the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which is being billed by the White House as the greatest shift in American doctrine since Dr. Strangelove devised a doomsday machine. The truth of the matter is that there is less change in the administration’s pronouncement than meets the eye—or should I say eyewash? An intriguing exception is the announcement that the U.S. would no longer respond first with nuclear weapons if attacked by states using chemical or biological weapons, so long as such states are non-nuclear and in compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Because Iran and North Korea are not in compliance—North Korea has quit the NPT and acquired atomic bombs of its own—they still need to worry about nuclear retaliation. As the NPR puts it in describing this “negative security assurance”:
An important question to ask is: why did the U.S. make this switch, which basically leaves our first-use policy toward Iran and North Korea intact but alters it for all other countries? An explanation of sorts has been put forward at a press briefing by James Miller, principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy:
