U.S. Strategic Command increases the likelihood of nuclear war during its annual Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, Nebraska on Wednesday and Thursday this week, at which “a more aggressive nuclear vision focused on strengthened deterrence and production is front and center,” Hans Kristensen, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project.

Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, was identified as being behind a change in US nuclear strategy that would place greater emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons, a change that would make them more likely to be used.

Colby’s change would de-emphasize the long-standing requirement for ‘damage limitation’ capabilities, which calls for a massive strategic nuclear attack against a U.S. nuclear adversary to try to destroy as many of their nuclear forces as possible.

Raising a discussion of “damage limitation” at this point is little more than part of the effort to make nuclear war conceivable, and no longer “off limits.”

Adding more tactical nuclear strike options would complicate the tenuous nuclear deterrence relationships the United States maintains with other nuclear-armed states and increase the risk of nuclear war.

Without a firm rejection of the option to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, and by building and fielding more tactical nuclear weapons the administration is signalling its intention to use them against enemy forces and industrial infrastructure in a conflict. Once nuclear weapons are used in a conflict involving another nuclear-armed state, there is no guarantee that any use of nuclear weapons, even on the smallest scale, could reliably be expected to remain limited.