The George W Bush-led US government considered using nuclear weapons against Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, according to a report published by a leading German news magazine.
An aide to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder told Der Spiegel in an interview that nuclear option was one of the possibilities examined by the US administration of former US president George W Bush and then-vice president Dick Cheney.
“They had really played through all possibilities,” Michael Steiner, Schroder’s political adviser, was quoted as saying in the report.
The German official stated that Schroder had feared that the US would overreact to 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda that killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.
Steiner is a senior German diplomat who has been serving the German ambassador to India since March 2012.