COLUMN LEFT : Just How Far Is Bush Prepared to Go in War? : Would the U.S. use the ultimate weapon against Iraq? Statements are ambiguous.

American warships in the Persian Gulf, submarines in the Red Sea and air bases in Saudi Arabia and Turkey bristle with arms of every description. Several hundred of these weapons are nuclear. Might they be used to win the ground war that is now poised to begin?

The conventional wisdom is that the Bush Administration has ruled out their use. But public statements by officials have been studies in ambiguity, and all official comment on the avoidance of “weapons of mass destruction” has been based on the assumption that the success of conventional arms would make them unnecessary. But there are disturbing signs that a large number of Americans would favor resorting to any means--even nuclear weapons--in order to prevail over continued Iraqi resistance.

The conduct of the Gulf War has reflected one overriding political concern: the limited public tolerance for high U.S. casualties. It’s hard to recall that barely a month ago the Senate vote authorizing war only squeaked through, 52-47. One reason swing voters came off the fence was the white paper by Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wisc.), predicting an easy victory with fewer than 1,000 U.S. dead. (Aspin now has the effrontery to say that the problem with public opinion is that “we have expectations (about casualty levels) that are unrealistic”; it is surely to his door that a list of the names of the dead should be nailed.)

What kind of war is being fought to save American lives? One commentator wrote recently that George Bush is a man who fights by the Marquess of Queensberry’s 19th-Century rules of fair play. More likely is that Bush shares the view of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who thinks the beauty of sustained aerial bombing has been that “such immense destruction can be delivered at virtually no cost”--in American deaths.

These have so far been kept to several dozen at the cost of the lives of unknown numbers of Iraqis, including hundreds of civilians in a Baghdad bomb shelter. U.S. pilots say they especially enjoy killing Iraqi troops in “turkey shoots,” as they scurry for cover like “cockroaches” when the light is flipped on. It’s hard to dignify this one-sided activity with a word like combat. More like a coward’s war.

But one-sided war seems to be all that the public has the stomach for. In a Los Angeles Times poll taken Jan. 17, the day after the initial attacks on Iraq, found that less than 40% of the respondents said they would consider the war successful if more than 1,000 U.S. troops were killed.

Worse, the polls indicate that large numbers are ready to see massive escalation to keep down U.S. casualties. Successive polls that have dared to speak the N-word show that a significant percentage would accept the logic of Hiroshima, nuking Iraqis to spare Americans. In two prewar surveys, 24% said they would favor going nuclear “If we became bogged down in a stalemate” (Time, Dec. 10) or “to quickly end any hostilities and save the lives of U.S. forces” (Newsweek, Jan. 14).

A Gallup poll in late January found that the approval rate for using “tactical nuclear weapons against Iraq if it might save the lives of U.S. troops” had risen to 45% after only two weeks of fighting--even before the first ground skirmish at Khafji and the death of 11 Marines.

That word tactical is all-important, for it hints at how modern battlefield nukes might be packaged by the spin doctors--not as the offspring of the doomsday weapons in whose shadow we have lived, but as the first cousins to Patriot missiles and laser-guided smart bombs, able to deliver small, precisely targeted warheads at exclusively military targets.

The argument might even be advanced that nuclear weapons would kill fewer Iraqis than protracted conventional warfare, and be no more inhumane than, say, fuel-air explosives, which kill by sucking every particle of oxygen from the air. (These dreadful weapons, neither publicly debated nor banned by international treaty, have now been uncrated by U.S. forces.) And defense hawks have already begun to argue that using nuclear weapons in the Gulf poses no threat today of an exchange with the Soviet Union--suggesting that the problem of the past half-century was only our fear of mutually assured destruction, rather than the moral anathema of all atomic weaponry.

The chances of the Gulf War going nuclear may still be remote. But the taboo against using the ultimate weapon appears to be less ironclad than we might wish to believe. And that in itself is grounds for the gravest concern about our moral condition.