Classified excerpts of the Bush Administration's Nuclear Posture Review hit the newspapers in March. Soon, all hell broke loose. Not since the woolly days of the nuclear freeze movement 20 years ago had the world seen such a torrent of criticism directed at strategic weapons policy. Never mind that most of the information revealed in the leaks could have been inferred from the unclassified summary of the NPR released weeks earlier. Never mind that many of the Bush recommendations echoed ones that the Clinton Administration presented in its own 1994 nuclear review. No, overheated analysts concluded that Bush officials had proposed changes in planning which, if implemented, would make it substantially more likely that someday―perhaps soon―a nuclear weapon would be used in anger somewhere in the world. "Mr. Bush needs to send that document back to its authors and ask for a new version less menacing to the security of future American generations," huffed the New York Times in an editorial titled, "America as Nuclear Rogue."
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