Slate's Scott Shuger, who wrote the Today's Papers feature for several years, has been contributing war analysis under the heading "war stories" for the online magazine (I know it's published by Microsoft, but I like its voice). In this entry, he says the plans to use nuclear weapons are nothing new. Of the three cases mentioned: "targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack; in retaliation for attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or 'in the event of surprising military developments'", the second one was pretty strongly implied during the Gulf War (Hussein is believed to have kept his weapons of mass destruction at bay because of the threat of nuclear retaliation), the latter would include possibilities like another WTC attack, and the first might include the possibility of using "cleaner, more focused tacitcal nukes that could obliterate an al-Qaida in its caves without endangering anyone else."

The concept of a controlled nuclear weapon should scare anyone -- if these things can be used without 2000 years of radioactive damage or starting World War III, won't they get used a lot more? (Thinking that only the US could retain the ability to make them is unrealistic.) The alert may not be as drastic as I thought the other day, but I'm still betting the doomsday clock moves closer to midnight.