The Latest US Nuclear War Game Gets Real

Posted: March 10th, 2020

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010. He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.

OPINION — On February 20, during his visit to Strategic Command (STRATCOM) headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska, Defense Secretary Mark Esper took part in a mini-war-game exercise which led to a simulated Russian firing of a low-yield nuclear weapon and the U.S. launching one back.

The next day, February 21, Defense Department officials held a background briefing for Pentagon reporters and said that the Esper war game scenario was that a conventional war had started in Europe leading Russia to use that low-yield nuclear weapon against a NATO site. In response, and after consultations, the stand-in U.S. president authorized a limited response using an American, low-yield nuclear weapon against an unnamed Russian target.

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