U.S. Forces Have No Nuclear Arms in Gulf States, No Plans to Use Them : Military: Officials fear such weapons could shatter the fragile coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein.

The United States has placed no nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia or surrounding countries and has no plans to use them even in response to an Iraqi attack using chemical or biological weapons, U.S. military officials said Monday.

After considerable debate among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a decision was made early in the crisis not to deploy tactical nuclear weapons with Army, Air Force or Marine Corps units sent to the area, the officials said.

Some Navy ships in the region are equipped with nuclear bombs and cruise missiles, but Navy ships customarily sail with nuclear weapons, and their presence is not meant as a threat to use them, according to military authorities.

Administration officials said that they have kept nuclear weapons out of the region not only for moral reasons, but also because a threat to use them could shatter the fragile coalition of nations now arrayed against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Besides, military commanders said, they are not needed to counter the threat posed by Iraq’s army.

“You lose the moral high ground if you use one of those stupid things,” a senior Army planner privy to discussions of the Joint Chiefs said. “Plus, you don’t have to. The conventional weapons we have there are absolutely, absolutely devastating and will have many of the same effects” as tactical nuclear weapons.

He cited in particular cluster bombs, which can wipe out large troop concentrations over an extensive area and new generations of conventional high explosives with many times the destructive power of earlier munitions.

And if a decision is ever made to employ nuclear weapons, they are readily available in abundance in Europe or could be dropped from B-52s based in Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, officials said.

The unusually frank U.S. government comments on nuclear weapons come in the wake of a weekend press report from Britain--since denied by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher--that Britain is prepared to use nuclear arms in response to an Iraqi chemical attack.

Iraq is known to have one of the world’s largest arsenals of chemical weapons and no compunctions about using them. Hussein has threatened to fire poison gas at U.S. and allied troops if war breaks out.

U.S. intelligence agencies also recently have reported that by the beginning of next year, Iraq will be able to produce and deliver substantial amounts of biological weapons, which involve living organisms used to spread diseases such as cholera, anthrax or typhoid fever.

But U.S. officials said there remains a huge gulf between these weapons of mass destruction and nuclear arms, which were not used in Korea and Vietnam even when the United States was on the verge of losing those conflicts.

Public U.S. policy statements since the end of World War II always have left the use or threat to use nuclear weapons ambiguous.

The United States insists that its nuclear weapons in Europe are there solely to deter their use by the Soviet Union and its allies, yet the United States has never forsworn their first use.

American military doctrine since the early 1960s has been one of “flexible response”--a continuum of escalation from the use of conventional military force to the unleashing of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in an all-out superpower war.

But in practical terms, nuclear weapons are taboo, officials said.

“The matter has been fairly heavily debated and discussed . . . among the Chiefs, and that’s the decision they came up with,” a knowledgeable civilian Pentagon official said of the policy of not sending tactical nuclear weapons to the Persian Gulf. “If we were to rattle the nuclear saber now, it wouldn’t bode well for the coalition.”

A senior Army officer noted that the use of nuclear weapons would expose as hypocritical previous U.S. efforts to stem the proliferation of nuclear technology, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

“If you popped a nuke, you’d lose the moral imperative overnight. The nuclear genie is still very much in the bottle. If you use one, every nation on Earth would want to have them and use them,” this officer said.

“It would have extraordinary and long-lasting consequences. It just points up the fact that nuclear weapons are fundamentally unusable,” he added.

Administration officials and outside analysts cited two other fundamental reasons why nuclear weapons have not been moved to Saudi Arabia: the elaborate security precautions required to protect them from being seized by terrorists or overrun in battle and the diplomatic repercussions of putting such weapons in a sovereign country without extensive consultations.

“You’d need 20,000 men just to guard them,” one senior military officer at the Pentagon said.

Artillery-launched nuclear shells would have to be deployed with forward units, running a high risk of their being captured in battle. The Air Force would have to build or find secure shelters to store air-dropped atomic bombs and missiles--an expensive and manpower-intensive proposition, officials said.

Diplomatic considerations also played in the decision not to send nuclear weapons to the Middle East, officials said.

The civilian planner noted that the Saudis invited the international force to deter an Iraqi attack, not to rain nuclear weapons on a fellow Arab state.

“Neither us nor the Brits could introduce them without Saudi approval”--and that hasn’t been granted, this official said.

But several officials and analysts noted that Hussein should not assume the United States could not or would not use nuclear weapons if the military situation grew sufficiently dire.

“The use of nukes is preposterous, and they have not been deployed in theater,” a Pentagon official said. “But we could get them there in a hurry if the President decided we needed them.”

Added Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear weapons specialist at the Brookings Institution: “There’s enough ambiguity in our deployments of nuclear weapons at sea and our ability to deliver nuclear weapons by air and quickly move them into the region to plant the seeds of doubt in Hussein’s mind.”

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this story.