No, there is a difference. Clearly the administration is trying to scare potential enemies but they are also floating a somewhat subtle, but important trial balloon. That is the idea of "bunker busting" nukes. This is a trojan horse concept.
The "Perle Doctrine" is simplistic and horrifying : leaving our potential enemies in place is dangerous, destroying them costs us nothing. That only approaches truth if you envision a largely push-button aerial war. Super-hardened bunkers are built to counter conventional aerial bombardment, therefore (the alleged thinking goes) we need a bunker-buster with super-conventional power.
The idea is that we may need some bomb to penetrate super-hardened bunkers that people like S. Hussein are building. Bullshit. Not unless we are crazy villains. The only reason you ever, ever, *justifiably* use a nuke against a hardened target is when that target contains a strategic weapon that you cannot disable otherwise before it is launched *and* that you believe the enemy is likely to use against your forces or civilian population. There is no need for a new or improved nuclear weapon to hit hardened targets since that is precisely what they have always been tasked to do. There is absolutely, inarguably nothing new about the battlefields that nuclear weapons might be used on in 2002 and beyond. All the weapons Iraq may have or develop, the Russians had decades ago and worse.
The Bush military are attempting to lower the threshhold for using nuclear weapons - subtly, but definitely. They are attempting to re-position nuclear weapons as super-conventional weapons. That is dangerous backsliding based on idea that a US first use in the periphery will not provoke a Russian action. That idea was probably always correct to some degree, but nobody dared test the hypothesis. The mutual fear on the part of the Soviet and US armies that they might provoke a M.A.D. scenario conveniently stood in for the well-justified fear that all civilians have of any sort of nuclear conflict. Now the M.A.D. fear has diminished and we see resulting this "mission creep" for the US nuclear arsenal into this outrageous super-conventional role the Perle-heads envision.
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