Besides developing new nuclear weapons, besides not ratifying a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, he rattles 'em.

Iran/U.S.: Bush Says All Options On The Table For Tehran 's Nuclear Program

When asked directly, he says the same things. Won't rule them out.

There is the Administration's contempt for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which is all but dead because the US refuses to ratify it.

And now there is the Nuclear Posture Review, a Pentagon planning document delivered to Congress in January and leaked to the media this week. Critics believe the review embraces an old right-wing idea never before endorsed by any administration: instead of treating nuclear weapons as so horrific that their use should never be considered unless the US faced immediate annihilation, they should be incorporated into the ordinary US arsenal.

They could even be used pre-emptively against nations without nuclear weapons.

If the critics are right, the global trend since the end of the Cold War to reduce and even eliminate nuclear weapons could be reversed.

"All previous administrations have seen these as weapons of last resort, and this administration sees them as first-choice weapons,"said Jo Cirincione, a nuclear proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The White House, furious that the report was leaked, has played down its significance.

"There is no way to read that document and come to the conclusion the United States will be more likely or will more quickly go to the use of nuclear weapons," said an exasperated Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

Mr Powell and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, said the US did not point nuclear weapons at any country, at least "not on a day-to-day basis".

The White House is right, up to a point. The unclassified sections of the review updates the US nuclear strategy to take into account that the Cold War is over. Mr Bush proposes slashing the number of nuclear warheads from 6000 to between 1700 and 2200 over the next decade (that is down from more than 30,000 in the 1960s).

However, an unnamed number would not be destroyed, but merely stored, ready to be re-deployed quickly, which critics say makes the offer meaningless.

"The reason one has a nuclear arsenal is to serve as a deterrence," Mr Bush said. He stressed that "all options are on the table", including nuclear strikes, to defend against chemical and biological attack from Iraq or any other country.