From the BBC:

A leaked document suggests that Washington is beginning detailed planning for a new generation of smaller nuclear weapons. The document - published by an anti-proliferation watchdog and confirmed as genuine by US officials - indicates the weapons could be used against targets like deep bunkers that contain chemical or biological agents.

This is what you call a first strike weapon. Incredible. I don't doubt that such weapons would be effective, or that they would be engineered to reduce the collateral damage that make tactical nuclear weapons prohibitive. But isn't this opening up a huge pandora's box? For the past few decades, policy makers have seen nuclear weapons as too dangerous to use in tactical situtations - not because they wouldn't be tactically useful, but because the one thing we had going for us in the fight against nuclear weapons use was the line separating conventional warfare and nuclear warfare. It was that line that made the cold war strategy of mutually assured destruction possible; if anyone had crossed it, the world would have been utterly destroyed. Building and using these weapons (and the Bush people definitely intend to use them - they're tailor-made for a war against the DPRK) crosses the line at a time when nuclear weapons are weilded by more and more powers - all of whom are watching us when they set policy.

I was in India last year on the anniversary of 9/11, and in the newspaper there was a special section about it. There was a picture of a woman with an American flag crying, with roughly this caption: "This woman lost her husband in the terrorist attacks on the WTC. Americans condemned the attacks, while still defending the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." As unfair as this comparison might have been, it was a revelation to me that people outside the US see our country in light of those horrific events. That an Indian paper published the story is particularly telling - this is a country whose nuclear weapons policy isn't settled, a country surely looking to the US for guidance. Won't proliferating nuclear weapons - even small ones - at a time when our policy is to preemptively attack other proliferators be seen as arrogant American hypocrisy?

UPDATE: According to this related article on the BBC site, Rumsfeld may also be interested in depolying a neutron bomb:

An independent American nuclear watchdog organisation, the Los Alamos Study Group has got hold of and has published the minutes of a meeting held at the Pentagon on 10 January 2003 at which preparations for a conference on the testing of current nuclear weapons and the design of a new generation of weapons was discussed.

The conference is planned for this August at Stratcom, the Strategic Command headquarters in Nebraska. The weapons listed are: low (radiation) yield, earth penetrating, enhanced radiation (the "neutron" bomb) and 'agent defeating'. Agent defeating refers not to blowing up enemies' agents but to the destruction of chemical and biological agents.

It's not clear to me whether we have neutron bombs now, although everything I can find says we were producing them under Reagan. Nuclearfiles.org has information about neutron bombs and their development.