What does this have to do with the original post ?
A little something called PDD 60 - Presidential Decision Directive #60. Here's Joel Skousen:
Skousen: PDD 60 is missing at the Clinton Library archives (Eliminates Launch on Warning)
ON NOVEMBER 16, 2021 BY JEFF FENSKEIN BOMB BOMB AMERICA?, JOEL SKOUSEN, WAR
World Affairs Brief, November 12, 2021 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.
Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (
World Affairs Brief).
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW
The anti-nuclear disarmament lobby, primarily Arms Control Today (ACT) and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), are enthused about the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review, due out early next year. They are hoping Biden will make good on his promises to advance nuclear disarmament and undo president Trump’s attempts to modernize America’s aging nuclear arsenal. Kingston Reif of Arms Control Today lays out the hopes of the disarmament crowd:
The Biden administration has formally begun a review of U.S. nuclear weapons policy against the backdrop of several competing pressures. These include President Joe Biden’s desire to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy and put the emphasis on a more holistic and integrated view of deterrence, concerns about increasingly aggressive Russian and Chinese nuclear behavior, the growing cost of the U.S. nuclear modernization program, and divisions in Congress about the future of U.S. nuclear policy.
As a candidate, President Joe Biden said the United States does not need new nuclear weapons. Whether he plans to act on that rhetoric will be reflected in the Nuclear Posture Review, which is intended to examine the size, role, and capability of the country’s nuclear arsenal.
Biden also expressed his belief that “the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and, if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack” against the United States and its allies.
PDD 60 is missing at the Clinton Library archives:
The above statement, “retaliating, if necessary” harks back to PDD-60, the dangerous 1997 change to our nuclear strategic doctrine, demanding our missile forces should NOT “launch on warning” in response to an incoming strike, but retaliate afterward—which is suicidal. Absorbing a massive first strike would take out all our silo-based missiles (400 + Minuteman III ICBMs with only a single warhead each) and all of our military bases capable of conducting a retaliation.
While a summary of PDD-60 still remains in the ACT archives and on the FAS.org website, the listing of Clinton Presidential Decision Directives (PDD) at the Clinton Presidential Library does not show a PDD-60, because it is classified. There are many others which are still classified which are missing too.
To illustrate how important a launch on warning strategy is, it is a long established nuclear doctrine that he who launches second, before enemy missiles arrive on target, wins the war. That’s because it takes between 15 minutes for a sub launched missile to hit its target and almost 30 minutes for a land based missile in Russia and China to hit US missiles fields. In addition, a warhead’s targeting cannot be changed once it separates from the missile. This time delay in missile trajectory gives just enough time to launch US missiles so that the incoming warheads hit empty silos. US missiles can then be redirected to hit viable enemy targets.
Eliminating Launch on Warning is not only a grave strategic error, it dismantles this core deterrent aspect of building nuclear weapons in the first place. Disarmament lobbies often cite the potential of a mistaken nuclear exchange where the US might launch a full nuclear response based on a false alarm. But it was never likely that the US would launch any missiles in response to a single warhead—it would just intercept that warhead. In addition, a huge first strike of hundreds of enemy missiles would never be mistaken as a false alarm.
The dangers of delaying a response to an incoming strike are increasing with the development of hypersonic warheads that are not only much faster than conventional warheads but maneuverable so they can evade the current anti-ballistic missile interceptors.
And, letting such a strike fall, can only be construed as our government’s intention to allow our military to be decapitated in order to force us the US into a militarized global government in response.
But the actual process of deciding when and how to respond to a Launch on Warning scenario is crucial and doesn’t allow for hardly any discussion. Here’s an article (ACT Jan/Feb 2018) by Bruce Blair who had a major role crafting PDD-60 in discussing how a presidential decision to launch comes down. His not-so-subtle purpose was to warn people about how an “unstable president” back then (Donald Trump) might make a mistake under Launch on Warning. Despite the bias, the protocol of how a nuclear response happens is good reading:
U.S. nuclear launch protocol has important virtues and serious liabilities. Major changes are needed to constrain a president who would seek to initiate the first use of nuclear weapons without apparent cause and to prevent him or her from being pushed into making nuclear retaliatory decisions in haste.
/snip/
