US considered nuking Afghanistan after 9/11

The United States considered using nuclear weapons against Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks, according to a report published by a leading German news magazine.

An aide to Germany’s former chancellor Gerhard Schröder told Der Spiegel in an interview that the nuclear option was one of the possibilities examined by the administration of former president George W Bush and then-vice president Dick Cheney.

“The papers were written,” Michael Steiner, Schröder’s political adviser, said when asked whether the US considered using nuclear weapons in response to the attacks by al Qaeda that killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.

“They had really played through all possibilities,” he was quoted as saying in the interview. According to Steiner, Schröder had feared that the US would overreact in shock in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Steiner is a senior German diplomat who has been serving as his country’s ambassador to India since March 2012.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 31st, 2015.