President Clinton has issued new guidelines for the use of nuclear weapons which order military planners to adapt their targets to the post-Cold War situation.
The Pentagon will no longer have to be prepared to fight a prolonged nuclear war with another superpower but will have more flexibility to respond quickly to more limited attacks or threats of nuclear attacks.
Cities and military installations in Russia and China can still be targeted under the new guidelines, should it prove necessary. At present the US does not have missiles aimed at Russia and other former Soviet Union countries.
Sources have told the Washington Post that the planners have been allowed to broaden the list of sites in China that might be struck in the unlikely event of a nuclear exchange.
The White House yesterday confirmed the signing of the new guidelines two weeks ago but only after it was told the Post was publishing an article on them.
This is the first time the guidelines on the use of nuclear weapons have been updated since President Reagan signed a 1981 directive at a time of growing tension between the US and the Soviet Union over the deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe.
The guidelines still allow the US to make a nuclear response to an attack with chemical or biological weapons. During the Gulf War, President Bush warned President Saddam Hussein that the US would use nuclear weapons in the case of such an attack, but in 1995 the US and the four other nuclear powers, Russia, China, Britain and France pledged not to use nuclear weapons or threaten them against countries not trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Mr Clinton is said to have ordered the review of the 1981 guidelines at the time of his summit meeting with the Russian President, Mr Boris Yeltsin, last spring when he realised they were outdated.
A review of the 1981 directive requiring the US to be ready to fight a prolonged nuclear war has been under way for several years to allow the US to conform to the START-2 nuclear weapons reduction treaty with Russia.
A White House adviser on defence policy, Mr Robert Bell, has told the Post the guidelines recognise that because "we are at the end of the Cold War and there have been changes in Russia, nuclear weapons now play a smaller role in our nuclear security strategy than at any point during the nuclear era".
Mr Bell said the new directive would not have the "previous references to being able to wage a nuclear war successfully or to prevail in a nuclear war . . . the emphasis [in the directive] is therefore on deterring nuclear weapons at any level, not fighting with them".
Mr Bell said nuclear weapons were still needed to deter "aggression and coercion" by threatening a response that "would be certain, overwhelming and devastating".
In Houston, a former director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Mr Lee Brown (60), defeated an oilman, Mr Rob Mosbacher, in a run-off election on Saturday to become the city's first black mayor.