Two American researchers: Washington says it may respond to cyber attacks with nuclear strikes... This is crazy!

Two American researchers from Stanford University saw that the current American nuclear doctrine, which was formulated during the administration of former President Donald Trump, gives the head of state the option of launching a nuclear strike on any country - such as Russia, China or North Korea - if its determination to launch major cyber attacks on the United States is confirmed. According to an analysis published by The Washington Post.

This military option became possible after the Trump administration in 2018 expanded the role of nuclear weapons by declaring for the first time that the United States would consider the possibility of nuclear deterrence, said international law and political science scholars Allen Weiner and Scott Sagan. In the event of "important non-nuclear strategic attacks".

This includes the exposure of "the population or infrastructure of the United States or its partners and allies" to similar attacks, and the same principle can be used to justify a nuclear response to a devastating biological weapons strike.

illegal action

But the researchers believe that a US resort to nuclear weapons in response to biological or cyber attacks would be "unlawful" under international law in almost all cases.

The threat of an illegal nuclear response - the researchers add - weakens the power of deterrence because it is a threat that lacks credibility, and this policy may lead the head of state to the exact opposite in the end to launch a nuclear attack in the event of the failure of the approach of waving deterrence.

The American public may indeed be willing to retaliate after a devastating strike by the enemy, but the law of armed conflict requires that some military options be taken off the table, including nuclear retaliation for "important non-nuclear strategic attacks."

The Biden administration is currently conducting its own review of the United States' nuclear posture, and the Trump amendments of 2018 are a point of urgent reassessment that has been generally ignored to this day.

Weiner and Sagan stress that, while officials review this course, they now have an opportunity to fully consider what might be called the "nuclear law revolution," a growing global recognition that international law's constraints on war, particularly those protecting civilians, apply even to Nuclear wars.

Most Americans are aware of the "strategic revolution" unleashed by nuclear weapons as the massive devastation caused by making deterrence a top priority for US national security.

Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, for example, Bernard Brodie, one of the leading strategists at the start of the Cold War, wrote, "Until now the chief aim of our military has been to win wars...from now on, we must Its main goal is to avoid it.

The idea rooted in decades of American deterrence has been that the United States would inflict "certain destruction" on the cities of any country that attacked it or its allies with nuclear weapons.

confidential documents

At the height of the Cold War, for example, US nuclear war plans were designed to destroy “at least 70 percent of the urban industrial centers of the Soviet Union and communist China” and “kill 30 percent of their population,” according to intelligence documents dating from 1969 to 1971. During President Richard Nixon's administration, it was recently declassified.

But it is clear - the authors conclude - that such plans cannot be reconciled with the basic principles of international law in armed conflict, which explains the US government's assertion in the 1970s that Additional Protocol I of 1977 from the Geneva Conventions signed in 1949 does not apply to nuclear weapons.

This later protocol made it mandatory for all states to follow the “principles of distinction” (drawing a line between military and civilian objectives) and “proportionality” (establishing that the unintended or collateral civilian harm caused by a legitimate attack does not exceed the military framework of the attack) during war. , and “precautions” (doing everything possible to avoid killing civilians or at least minimizing casualties), rules that the United States did not adhere to during that time.