Slate's Today's Papers has a couple of follow-ups on the recent disclosure that the Bush administration is preparing plans to use "tactical" nuclear weapons as a first-strike capability against some nations it doesn't like if it can't win in conventional war.

The Washington Post stuffs a report that the Bush administration's nuclear weapons policy review, which has caused an uproar, "follows a pattern set five years ago by a nuclear directive signed by then-President Bill Clinton." The paper explains that the previous plan also envisioned scenarios in which the U.S. would launch nukes at "rogue" states using weapons of mass destruction. "Nothing has changed," said one former Pentagon official.

A New York Times editorial doesn't mention Clinton's nukes policies, and slams Bush's revised vision:

If another country were planning to develop a new nuclear weapon and contemplating pre-emptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state. Yet such is the course recommended to President Bush by a new Pentagon planning paper that became public last weekend. Mr. Bush needs to send that document back to its authors and ask for a new version less menacing to the security of future American generations.