Details of the US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) make explicit a dangerous shift that threatens to undermine US security by encouraging others to develop new nuclear weapons and use them, and would violate US political and legal obligations. The NPR is a political roadmap to ultimate catastrophe.

The US spends more on conventional military forces than the next 15 nations combined. If we must rely on the threat to use nuclear weapons against non nuclear weapons states, and if we develop new nuclear weapons to obtain security, then what are we saying to the rest of the world?

Though the administration has insisted that the NPR represents a general plan rather than a specific policy, this linguistic slight of hand has not diminished vigorous criticism in Russia, China, and even our NATO allies.

With the NPR, the US emphasizes nuclear weapons not as devices of deterrence, but as weapons of war, and thus erodes the norms against nuclear use. The NPR even calls for the development of new low-yield "mini-nukes" that could be used against hardened underground bunkers.

Former White House national security science advisor Frank Von Hippel said that if the US were to use nuclear weapons, as contemplated in the NPR, "we would have violated a taboo that we've had in place since Nagasaki. With our enormous conventional superiority, that would be the ultimate in stupidity and self destructiveness. By using nuclear weapons, we would make it permissible for others to use them against us."

The lowered threshold for using nuclear weapons undercuts the moral prohibition against any such use. This increases the likelihood of their use against the US, and undermines US ability to criticize such immoral activity by others.

Rather than working toward strengthening control of fissile material and diminishing reliance on nuclear weapons, the NPR implicitly lauds their political and military value, thus stimulating proliferation. If 9-11 has taught us anything, it is that we must now strengthen the global norm against the use of nuclear weapons. The NPR does just the opposite.

As a party to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the US is duty-bound to negotiate in good faith the elimination of nuclear weapons. At the NPT's 2000 Review Conference, the US and 186 other countries pledged an "unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals."

Additionally, 182 countries rely on a US promise that it will not use nuclear weapons against them, unless they attack the US in conjunction with a nuclear state. Also, the development of new nuclear weapons would imply a rejection of the ten-year nuclear testing moratorium, undermining the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

The announced withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) coupled with the NPR will cause the international community to question whether the US is negotiating in good faith to implement its treaty obligations. It is irresponsible to play fast and loose with the non-proliferation regime. Nothing could be more dangerous than a world without legal constraints on developing nuclear arsenals.

The Bush administration has been trumpeting its recent agreement with Russia to cut nuclear arms. Without a treaty regime, the cuts will be unverifiable and easily reversible. With an accounting flourish worthy of an Enron executive, the claim of reducing the arsenal to about 2,200 by 2012 proves deceptive. According to the Natural Resource Defense Council, the plan calls for the US to retain a total stockpile of intact nuclear warheads and weapons components seven to nine times larger than the publicly-stated goal of 1,700 to 2,200 "operationally deployed weapons."

Multilateral, cooperative enforcement of the existing treaty regime is indeed needed. This can only be achieved by diminishing reliance on nuclear weapons, and increasing enforcement of the rule of law, even by the use of multilateral force where needed.

A nuclear plan that would insure our safety should include the following steps: (1) a full de-alert of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals; (2) a pledge never to use nuclear weapons first; (3) a permanent, global end to all nuclear testing; (4) intrusive verifications to prevent the development of nuclear weapons programs in countries that would use them against the United States; (5) a strengthening, not weakening, of the existing rule of law governing nuclear weapons policies, and (6) the commencement of negotiations leading to a gradual global elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Jonathan Granoff is President of the Global Security Institute and Co-Chair of the American Bar Association's Committee on Arms Control and National Security.