Dave DeCamp – AntiWar.com Aug 9, 2026
Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, who has long called for the US to prepare to fight a “limited nuclear war”
“If you actually want extended deterrence to be credible, you have to provide the nation’s political leadership with nuclear capabilities that common sense indicates you could actually use,” a source told NBC. “Otherwise you’re reducing our leadership’s options to extreme choices that the adversary won’t find credible.”
While the potential strategy would be carried out in the name of deterrence and preventing war, arms control advocates have strongly warned against the idea of developing more tactical nuclear weapons to prepare for a potential limited nuclear conflict over concerns that it would make nuclear war much more likely and that any nuclear exchange would likely lead to a global catastrophe.
“Without a firm rejection of the option to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, by building and fielding more tactical nuclear weapons the administration is signaling its intention to use them against enemy forces and industrial infrastructure in a conflict,” the Arms Control Association said in response to the NBC report.
The ACA said that it “strongly opposes the administration’s decision to build more tactical nuclear weapons to supplement the options that exist” and pointed to the fact that the US already has at least two types of tactical nuclear weapons, including B61-12 gravity bombs, which are deployed in Europe, and the W76-2 low-yield warhead for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile.
The ACA said the US Navy is also “acquiring a new nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) that may be available at the end of the decade for possible use in conflict with China.”
Breaking Defense reported that Colby announced on August 5 that the Pentagon was reviewing the US nuclear posture and repeatedly emphasized the term “options” in a speech he delivered that has not been made public.
Colby has been one of the leading voices in Washington’s policy circles advocating for the US to prepare for limited nuclear war. In a 2015 paper for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) titled “A Nuclear Strategy and Posture for 2030,” Colby said the US “should make a special effort to develop the platforms and weapons, doctrine, planning capacity, and other capabilities needed to fight a limited nuclear war more effectively than plausible adversaries.”
He said that the ideal US nuclear force is “one that is not only highly survivable and able to issue a devastating blow against any adversary under any scenario but that is also capable of conducting effective limited nuclear operations in a controlled fashion while maintaining the ability to escalate to full-scale war if necessary.”
Colby made a similar argument in a 2018 piece written in Foreign Affairs titled “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War,” published just a few months after he left the first Trump administration, where he led the development of the 2018 National Defense Strategy.
“Washington’s task is clear. It must demonstrate to Moscow and Beijing that any attempt to use force against US friends and allies would likely fail and would certainly result in costs and risks well out of proportion to whatever they might gain,” Colby wrote. “This requires conventional military power, but it also means having the right strategy and weapons to fight a limited nuclear war and come out on top.”
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The American Major Alexander Seversky observed the aftermath of Hiroshima and said:
“In Hiroshima, I was prepared for radically different sights. But, to my surprise, Hiroshima looked exactly like all the other burned-out cities in Japan. There was a familiar pink blot, about two miles in diameter. It was dotted with charred trees and telephone poles. Only one of the cities twenty bridges was down. Hiroshima’s clusters of modern buildings in the downtown section stood upright. It was obvious that the blast could not have been so powerful as we had been led to believe. It was extensive blast rather than intensive. I had heard of buildings instantly consumed by unprecedented heat. Yet here I saw the buildings structurally intact, and what is more, topped by undamaged flag poles, lightning rods, painted railings, air raid precaution signs and other comparatively fragile objects. At the T-bridge, the aiming point for the atomic bomb,
I looked for the “bald spot” where everything presumably had been vaporized in the twinkling of an eye. It wasn’t there or anywhere else. I could find no traces of unusual phenomena. What I did see was in substance a replica of Yokohama or Osaka, or the Tokyo suburbs – the familiar residue of an area of wood and brick houses razed by uncontrollable fire. Everywhere I saw the trunks of charred and leafless trees, burned and unburned chunks of wood. The fire had been intense enough to bend and twist steel girders and to melt glass until it ran like lava – just as in other Japanese cities. The concrete buildings nearest to the centre of explosion, some only a few blocks from the heart of the atom blast, showed no structural damage. Even cornices, canopies and delicate exterior decorations were intact. Window glass was shattered, of course, but single-panel frames held firm; only window frames of two or more panels were bent and buckled.
The blast impact therefore could not have been unusual. Then I questioned a great many people who were inside such buildings when the bomb exploded. Their descriptions matched the scores of accounts I had heard from people caught in concrete buildings in areas hit by blockbusters. Hiroshima’s ten-story press building, about three blocks from the centre of the explosion, was badly gutted by the fire following the explosion, but otherwise unhurt. The people caught in the building did not suffer any unusual effects.”
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No Hiroshima atom bomb then no “nukes”. No nukes then no “tactical nukes”.
These war mongering imbeciles make up an infinitesimal fraction of the world’s population while making decisions that affect everyone on the planet. Funny how climate change is so important that we have to give up living but hardly worth a mention when you want to fire endless rockets and blow things up incessantly, or fireworks. Endless fireworks don’t seem to be a problem either. These loons a fucking evil. They should be rounded up put on an island somewhere where they can kill each other till their heart content.
Oooh, scary, another guy yelling about some future war using the “N” word. Colby is of the weapons dealers, a rep for arms sales, and if he were not he would be a pharma products distributor.
Pentagon drafting new propaganda so they can pretend to defend against ANY aggresion, you know, in a “pre-emtive” sort of way.
If the US uses nukes on a country most of the world knows doesn’t have a nuke, and those who say it does are just plain lying, then the US will become so grievous a pariah that US tourists will be run out of most places they visit. Like is already starting to happen with Israelis.
Yes, of course, DO IT! Repeat Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ensure full-American spectrum dominance over those backward people who dare to interfere with Israeli and American private interests. Kill just enough of them to being the nation into the US terms of unconditional surrender.
DO IT and I pray for an escalation in which missiles will also rain down on targets in Israel, the US and any other nation supporting the war, AND LET THEM BE NUKES. It just may wake the people in our nations as to the real nature of war and all of the suffering, loss, and misery to the victims. Lets bring the war effort up to real modern sociopathic standards, and use our most sophisticated weapons. Even if it means the US will become more of a pariah on the world stage, arm and arm with genocidal Israel, murdering and robbing all those who resist their greed, let us ride on hurricane of technological change for the cause of our good, our truth, and our right, and F the rest of the world.
Why this war means the end of any real Pax-American and the quick demise of the American business empire:
1. Iran has demonstrated that with cheap drones and missiles any nation can vanquish any American base in their borders or near their borders.
2. Unless the US now uses nukes or bombs Iran into the stone age for its temerity, every other people of every nation feeling it is being exploited by an American presence will simply start manufacturing the same cheap weapons and even acquire supersonic missiles which cannot be stopped.
3. By the US crushing Iran, it becomes in the eyes of the rest of the world another Israeli pariah totally relying on force and fear, and ending up, as a result, being the most hated nation in the world, and as with Israel, which cannot help the spilling over of derision and disgust even to innocent Jews and American now becoming the most hated people in the world.
4. Those running Israel and the US mainly rely on force and fear which they think holds their business empire together. However, commerce is mainly held together with trust and good will, which is most often in conflict with force and fear in producing any kind of real prosperity. The Americans are blowing it.
5. By destroying Iran, or bringing it to its knees for all of the planned pillaging and perks for the Western stakeholder ruling class, the American military bases may seem more secure, but they likely will become even more precarious.
6. The resulting mistrust and hate generated in conquering Iran will not stop nations around the world from arming themselves with weaponry they can afford in order to neutralize the threat of American force and fear in their presence being used to control them.
7. The Jewish and American moguls say that they do not care about the resultant hate in far-away foreign nations like in South-East Asia, as the official diktats from above say that the world is being carved up on a multipolar basis with the US withdrawing from many theatres and with nations such as Iran and the Ukraine being up for grabs, and with USIsrael to be in control of West Asia.
8. However, the pattern is that not even the spread of cheap devastating arms can be controlled much less than AI which is already out of control, and what this means is that the trade off of trust and good will for force and fear, and by abandoning up-ramp of all relevant internationals conventions, does entrail the radical acceleration of the decline and isolation of American influence, and far more resistance to any Jewish or American control in the entire West.
Here we go. The neocons going into full retard mode.
Yes ! cocacola dose size neutron nukes
are the next for false flag mastewrship .
our medias + public dont mention
Gaza Holocaust . the highnoseed
old + new german generation should
experience how war is !
to learn that they are only worms .
There are no nuclear weapons. A reporter once asked Harold Wilson about nuclear weapons, he said we don’t have any but Neither do the other side. Very telling indeed