US nuclear warplans fly around the internet

Washington, DC, UNITED STATES — "Even in an unclassified world this is not the kind of thing you want flying around the Internet," says Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita. He was talking about a document, yanked from a Pentagon website on September 19th, which outlines US nuclear warfighting plans, including the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons and the use of nukes in conventional war.

Comments to the document by the various military branches reveal squabbling about who gets to run a nuclear war, a disagreement about the legality of pre-emptive warfighting strategies, and a discussion of the etiquette of alerting allied troops that a nuclear attack is coming their way.

This is exactly the kind of information which we believe ought to be flying around the internet; these guys really shouldn't be left alone to talk about this stuff behind closed doors.

So we took our copy and uploaded it here at www.greenpeace.org. You can help ensure it flies around the internet some more by sending this article to a friend.

Nuclear war: it's not just for breakfast anymore
The document is a rare unpolished look at how the Cold War doctrine of nuclear first strike - previously spun as "deterrence" - has taken on a new dimension.

It reveals that the threshold for actually using nuclear weapons has been lowered dramatically.

And it outs the untruth of George Bush claiming that the US is reducing the importance of its nuclear arsenal.