I’m a little late to the game on this but Keith Payne published an op-ed in the Washington Times last month attacking the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review and the New START treaty.  NoH has long been fascinated by Payne’s views on arms control, particularly his willingness to run roughshod over the final report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, on which he served as a Commissioner.  As Mort Halperin – who also served on the Commission – noted at recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on New START, “the Treaty now before the Senate conforms in every material way with the recommendations of the Commission.”

It appears that the Obama administration has had just about enough of Payne as well.  At the Senate Armed Services Committee’s June 17 hearing on New START with Secretary of Defense Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen, Secretary of State Clinton, and Secretary of Energy Chu, Senator Roland Burris (D-IL) asked the witnesses about Payne’s op-ed, specifically the claim that the treaty only requires U.S. force reductions.  To borrow a line from Blades of Glory (I watched it again recently for probably the 24th time), Clinton slipped Payne a very public note in response:

The perfect example indeed.  Payne’s claim that Russia won’t have to make any cuts to its nuclear forces is both substantively incorrect and misses the point (see earlier posts addressing this issue here and here)…  

Let’s take a closer look at Payne’s argument that Russia gets off scot free:

In addition, the NPR emphasizes the resilience of U.S. strategic forces, but New START limits their resilience by mandating a lower ceiling on deployed bombers and missiles than was earlier suggested publicly by senior Defense Department and military officials, and by effectively requiring only U.S. force reductions – a fact Russians have noticed. Russian strategic analyst Aleksey Arbatov notes in a March 5 Russian article: “The new treaty is an agreement on reducing the American and not the Russian [strategic nuclear forces]. In fact the latter will be reduced in any case because of the mass removal from the order of battle of obsolete arms and the one-at-a time introduction of new systems.” Russian defense journalist Alexander Golts similarly writes in the Moscow Times that Russia can “fulfill its pledge without eliminating a single actual weapon. The same is true regarding warheads.”

First, STRATCOM Commander Gen. Kevin Chilton recently addressed the concern raised last summer by some in the military that New START should not limit deployed delivery vehicles below about 800 (New START limits the U.S. and Russia to no more than 700 deployed missile and bombers and no more than 800 deployed and non-deployed launchers).  According to Gen. Chilton, “time has passed…and we have had the opportunity to do a lot more analysis during this period.  And as we looked at it, it not only made sense strategically, but it certainly is doable to continue to sustain the triad at these current [New START] numbers.” (UPDATE 7/13: See Amyfw’s helpful addendum to Chilton’s comments below. For more on the flexibility offered by New START, see here.) 

Second, while Russia is already under the treaty’s limit on delivery vehicles, Secretary Gates has stated on more than one occasion that the number of Russian deployed strategic warheads “is above the treaty limits.  So they [the Russians] will have to take down warheads.”  In fact, if you believe the open source estimates of the current number of deployed U.S. and Russia warheads, then New START will require Russia to cut more warheads from its deployed force than the U.S.

In any event, Payne should have found someone other than Arbatov and Golts to support his point that New START is a bad deal for the U.S.  In April Arbatov opined: “The main significance is restoration of the formal, legally binding dialogue and framework of strategic relationship between the two leading nuclear superpowers.”  Meanwhile, Golts has written that “Moscow gave in to practically all U.S. demands.”  

But to a certain extent all of this is beside the point.  As numerous commentators (including Arbatov) have pointed out, New START is not in the first instance a reductions treaty, although some reductions in deployed forces are required.  Rather, the treaty’s legally-binding limits and monitoring and verification provisions will prevent the growth of Russia’s deployed forces and give us an essential window into their composition and location that we haven’t had since START I expired on December 5 of last year.

This in turn will ensure a predictable and stable U.S.-Russian nuclear relationship, thereby reducing the risk of mutual suspicion, worst case scenario planning, and by extension the chances of an accidental or unauthorized U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange.  And the more stable and predictable the relationship, the better off our allies are, which probably explains why so many of them support New START.

To sum up, I’ll again defer to Gen. Chilton:

If we don’t get the treaty, [the Russians] are not constrained in their development of force structure and…we have no insight into what they’re doing. So its the worst of both possible worlds.

The longer New START awaits Senate advice and consent, the longer U.S. inspectors will remain in the U.S. and not on the ground in Russia inspecting Russia’s nuclear arsenal.  Someone should ask Keith Payne how this benefits U.S. security.

Last week was a big week for New START on the op-ed pages and blogs.  Joe Cirincione has a nice little summary of what transpired over at the Huffington Post.  Like Jeffrey Lewis, I thought the best response (and there were many good ones) to Mitt Romney’s embarrassing effort to dress himself up as knowledgeable about national security was provided by Sen. Lugar.

Jeffrey highlights Sen. Lugar’s response to the claim that New START is a bad treaty because it doesn’t capture Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons.  As Jeffrey notes, this is just plain dumb, for while Russia’s non-strategic weapons are a concern, failure to ratify New START would make it just about impossible to reach a subsequent agreement with Russia on tactical nuclear weapons, whether that agreement comes in the form of greater transparency, central storage, and/or actual reductions.  

Yet I thought the most interesting part of Sen. Lugar’s response on tac nukes was his view of the threat they pose (or don’t pose) to our allies in Europe…

Writes Lugar:

Russia does have more tactical weapons than we do, but he [Romney] distorts their value by implying that they constitute a serious missile threat to Europe.  In fact, most of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons either have very short ranges, are used for homeland air defense, are devoted to the Chinese border, or are in storage.  He also ignores that our NATO allies have endorsed the New START Treaty.  A Russian attack on NATO countries is effectively deterred by NATO conventional superiority, our own tactical nuclear forces, French and British nuclear arsenals, and U.S. strategic forces.

Senator Lugar is not the only Republican to have expressed such views.  Never one to lack for great arms control one liners, Linton Brooks once stated:

I’ve never completely understood why something that only blows up in Russia is a threat to me unless I plan to invade.

Even Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher seems to get it.  In an exchange with Keith Payne at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on nuclear weapons policy last year, Rohrabacher noted:

Let me suggest that the point you just made, that the tactical nuclear weapons should be a major concern, absolutely not — just the opposite. Tactical nuclear weapons that by the — we’re talking about in terms of their land forces, et cetera, we’re not going to invade Russia; they’re not going to be used against people invading Russia from Europe or from the United States. Those weapons will help deter a communist Chinese attack on Russia and they know that; that’s why they don’t want to give it up and we should realize that as a justifiable fear. And how we do that, perhaps, is making sure that we don’t create this false impression that we are still in a state of Cold War with the Russians by expanding NATO.

A close examination of the types of tactical weapons in the Russian arsenal reveals that Moscow’s alleged advantage (10:1 is the most oft-cited number) turns out to be not that much of an advantage at all.  They simply don’t increase the threat already posed by Russia’s strategic weapons.  This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want to get a handle on them.  As many security experts have noted, tactical nuclear weapons are more vulnerable to loss or theft than strategic weapons.  But grossly overstating their geopolitical significance is inaccurate and creates a justification for hanging on to far more nuclear weapons than we actually need.

There has rightly already been a lot of great commentary excoriating Mitt Romney for his absolutely outlandish op-ed on New START in yesterday’s WaPo.  I really laughed out loud when I read the reference to putting ICBMs on bombers.  To my kn…

Time and time again, politicians, pundits, and security experts have painted the terrifying picture of a mushroom cloud looming over the vaporized remains of an American city.  If you look at the budget for missile defense (DoD has requested approximately $10 billion for FY 2011) you’d think that the most likely attack on the United States would come via a ballistic missile, given that what the U.S. spends on missile defense greatly exceeds combined spending on domestic and international maritime and port of entry interdiction efforts and nuclear detection activities.

The dirty little secret of domestic nuclear defense, however, is that should the US ever come under nuclear attack, odds are that it will not come from a missile launch.  Instead, a nuclear device or dirty bomb is likely to be delivered from a non-missile source, such as a container entering a U.S. port..  On June 30, witnesses at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs revealed that the US remains woefully vulnerable to this kind of threat…

The committee heard from three witnesses:

•    Eugene E. Aloise
Director, Natural Resources and Environment Division
U.S. Government Accountability Office

•    Micah D. Lowenthal, Ph.D.
Director, Nuclear Security and Nuclear Facility Safety Program, Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board
National Research Council of the National Academies

•    Dana A. Shea, Ph.D.
Specialist in Science and Technology Policy; Resources, Science, and Industry Divsion; Congressional Research Service
Library of Congress

The purpose of the hearing was to examine the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), a little-known agency established in 2005 within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to detect nuclear smuggling operations (the hearing coincided with the release of a GAO report on the issue).  The office is charged with creating an overarching system of domestic nuclear detection involving the Departments of Defense, Energy, and State (as well as others), a mandate that has met with some success.  About two-thirds of the more than 2,100 radiation portal monitors planned for by the DHS have been deployed at points of entry around the US.  Today, nearly all cargo containers transported by vehicles across our borders are scanned for nuclear materials, as are almost 100% of all containers coming through our seaports.

However, according to the GAO report, only a small percentage of rail and air cargo is ever scanned, and DHS has also failed to meet its scanning and inspection goals for commercial air cargo, baggage, and passengers.  Indeed, as Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman noted, “As I look back and look at where we are now…the threat of nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is growing faster than our ability to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack.”  The witnesses confirmed this conclusion, placing the blame squarely on the DNDO.

A January 2009 GAO study, for instance, recommended that DHS address critical gaps in nuclear detection identified by the DNDO, especially un-policed border areas, commercial aviation, and small sea vessels operating outside of large ports, as soon as possible.  DNDO has since taken no action on these issues.  Instead of focusing on expanding coverage, since 2006 DNDO spent $234 million dollars (out of a possible $2 billion allocated) on developing advanced spectroscopic portal (ASP) radiation detection monitors, an upgrade over the current monitors that both Mr. Aloise and Dr. Lowenthal described as being a marginal improvement at best.  In addition, all three witnesses criticized the DNDO for failing to create a strategic plan to address the domestic nuclear threat (originally called for by the GAO in 2002), leading to a lack of cohesion between departments and wasted time and tax dollars.

When pressed by Sen. Lieberman for his opinion, Mr. Aloise said that had the DNDO focused on coverage instead of technological upgrades, closing gaps in protection would have been achievable: “There’s certainly ways, if given the resources and analysis, you could do it.  So yes, we believe it can be done.”

Even the DNDO seems to have realized that its current direction is the wrong one, having requested an additional $13 million for another round of studies to produce a new master plan.  Officials from DHS were invited to the hearing, but were apparently not prepared to testify. Another hearing has been scheduled for July 21.

“The time,” said a clearly frustrated Lieberman, “for multi-year ‘studies’ is over; the time for urgent action really is now.”

After weeks of intense debate, the House passed an approximately $80 billion emergency supplemental appropriations bill last night that will lend an additional $33 billion to the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq.

In the end, the vote to advance the nearly $60 billion Senate-passed measure came under a vote on the rule, an obscure process used to allow the House to vote to set the terms for debate on the bill, but not on the underlying bill.  Inside the rule, the bill was deemed passed after the rule passed.  The vote was close, but eeked by at 215-210.  The budget resolution (that isn’t really a budget resolution) was included within the self-executing rule.

The House then took up five separate amendments.

(after the jump)

The first includes a $1 billion youth summer jobs program and a settlement of the Cobell v. Salazar and Pigford v. Vilsack class action lawsuits, among other things.

The bulk of the House’s $20 billion addition, however, comes from the second amendment which includes:

•    $10 billion for an Education Jobs Fund that will prevent impending local teacher layoffs
•    $4.95 billion to address the current year shortfall in the Pell Grant Program
•    $701 million for border security
•    $304 million for the Gulf Coast oil spill (the Senate bill carried $162 million)
•    $50 million for The Emergency Food Assistance Program
•    $163 million to improve elementary and secondary schools on DoD installations
•    $180 million in loan guarantees, split evenly between nuclear and renewable energy programs
•    $16.5 million for the replacement of the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood.
•    $538 million to strengthen waste, fraud and abuse prevention and enforcement for Medicaid, Medicare and the IRS.

The spending in the amendment is entirely offset by cuts.  One of these cuts, though, sparked an immediate reaction from the White House.  In an unusually public clash with Democratic allies, the President has promised to veto the bill if a proposed $800 million cut from programs such as the Race to the Top grant initiative is adopted.

The final three votes were largely symbolic and focused primarily on Afghanistan.

The first, with no named sponsor, would eliminate military funding for Afghanistan from the bill, but received only 25 votes.  The second would call for the money to go only toward a withdrawal.  This amendment garnered significantly more votes, with 100 ayes and 321 noes.

The third, sponsored by Reps. David Obey (D-Wis.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Walter Jones (R-N.C.), received 162 votes.  The bill would require a new National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan by January 31, 2011, and a plan by April 4, 2011, on the redeployment of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, including a timeframe for the completion of the redeployment.

While none of these three Afghanistan amendments ultimately passed, they send a powerful message about the country’s growing impatience with the war.