Last Thursday I spoke at a conference on nuclear weapons hosted by the State Department titled “Generation Prague”.  As the title suggests, the conference was aimed at young people and looked at the challenges and opportunities facing the “Post Cold War Generation” working in arms control and nonproliferation.

I spoke on the afternoon panel titled “Intergenerational Perspectives” with former NNSA Director Linton Brooks and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Frank Rose.  Our panel prompted a spirited discussion and seemed to generate a lot of interest from the audience.  Below are my opening remarks.

The Prague Generation and Nuclear Weapons

Thanks Jonathon.  It’s a pleasure to be here.  I want to thank the State Department for inviting me to participate on this panel, and for hosting today’s conference.  In all honesty, I feel out of place given Linton and Frank’s long experience in and enormous contributions to our profession both inside and outside of government.

But someone has to represent the so-called “Prague Generation,” and the reality is that we haven’t been around that long.  Then again, looks can be deceiving.  I’m 28 years old, but I’m pretty sure Amb. Brooks still has more hair than I do.

I thought I’d use my opening statement to share some thoughts on what drew me to this field and what I think nuclear weapons mean to our generation.

I think the best way to do that is to start by describing two events in particular that have largely defined the way in which I think about nuclear weapons, and I believe they shed a lot of light on the challenges and opportunities that our generation faces…

The first event is the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Now you might be asking yourself how someone that didn’t live through that event could be so influenced by it.  You might also be asking why I’m fixating on an event that occurred during the Cold War.

Well, let me explain.

During my Junior year at Brown University, I enrolled in a seminar on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Weapons of Mass Destruction.  The instructors of the course, Professors James Blight and janet Lang, were the principal organizers of two conferences which occurred on the 30th and 40th anniversaries of the crisis and brought together newly declassified documents and participants in the events of October 1962 from the U.S., Soviet Union, and Cuba (including then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Fidel Castro).  Thanks to these conferences and additional revelations, we now know that the Crisis was far more dangerous than any of the participants at the time could have possibly imagined.  Or as McNamara put it some years later, in the end it was largely luck that prevented a nuclear war.

Simply put, I was terrified by what I learned in the seminar.  For me the lessons of the crisis are chillingly clear.  Kennedy was rational, Khrushchev was rational, even Castro was rational.  Yet nuclear war almost occurred anyway.  As McNamara stated in the Academy Award winning documentary The Fog of War, the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.

The second event is 9/11.  Like the Missile Crisis, I think this event is noteworthy as much for what didn’t happen as it is for what happened.

For me 9/11 illustrated the damage that could have been done by a terrorist group armed with weapons of mass destruction.  9/11 – and the discovery of A.Q. Kahn’s nuclear Walmart a few years later – seemed to encapsulate the erratic and unpredictable world in which we now live; a world in which our enormous nuclear arsenal of over 5,000 weapons seems powerless to keep us safe.

From the perspective of our generation then, the world seems to have changed in fundamental ways.  The world is more chaotic and unpredictable.  Because of this the nuclear status quo no longer seems tenable.  

But there is a tendency to view the challenges and problems of ones own generation as new or unique when they are not.  The world has changed since the end of the Cold War, but the age-old questions about deterrence and the role and purpose of nuclear weapons are still with us today.  And as the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrates, despite the seemingly halcyon stability of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, the risk of catastrophe has always been real.

In effect, we’ve been fighting the same battles for decades.  

Witness, for example, the recently concluded New START debate.  The debate over the treaty in the Senate occurred largely within a Cold War frame.  The strongest argument deployed by proponents of the treaty was that treaty is necessary to monitor and verify the size and location of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.  This argument may have been good enough to ensure 67 votes for New START, but we’re in need of a much larger fundamental reframing of the nuclear danger if we’re to make progress on the rest of the agenda – to say nothing about the ultimate goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Which begs the question: How can the danger be reframed?  Can it be reframed?  Either way, it will be up to the Prague generation to move the Prague agenda forward.  

Let me end with a few thoughts on the challenges and opportunities our generation faces as we seek to move that agenda forward.

First the good news.

First, opinion research shows that our generation in particular is open to the narrative that nuclear weapons are a liability rather than an asset.  For example, an April 2010 poll showed that 66% of American’s between the age of 18 and 34 approve of reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, versus 53% between the age of 35 and 54 and 49% over the age of 55.

Second, based on conversations I’ve had with colleagues who study the impact of generational attitudes on foreign policy, preceding generations underestimate how cosmopolitan our generation is.  “Foreign” is not necessarily unknown or unknowable (or even scary) to us in a way that it was to earlier generations.  This is important because we are unlikely to make meaningful progress on disarmament unless we identify ourselves as being part of something much larger, dare I say something global.  The danger posed by nuclear weapons is a shared danger, and reducing and ultimately eliminating that danger will require a cooperative global effort.

Third, younger generations are by nature far less cynical about the limits of the possible than older generations.  We don’t have scars from past battles.  As President Obama stated in his Prague Speech “fatalism is a deadly adversary.”

Fourth, our generation is already making its mark on moving the Prague agenda forward.  We’re already represented here at the State Department and elsewhere in the administration.  Outside of government, a coalition of young people working throughout the arms control and disarmament community has formed a group called “the Prague Project.”  The Project is raising awareness about the nuclear threat and providing opportunities for communication, collaboration, and action.  Meanwhile, the Global Zero movement has established chapters on college campuses all across the country.

Yet while I’m hopeful about all that we can achieve, we should all be mindful of the enormous challenges we face.

First, I think the predominant attitude that defines our generation’s attitude toward nuclear weapons is, not surprisingly, apathy.  Obviously I’m not speaking about anyone in this room.  But I think there is a general attitude that nuclear weapons are a problem of the past.  Put in another way the threat seems entirely abstract.

Previous generations have at times awakened to the nuclear danger, which has prompted a meaningful sense of urgency about doing something about it.  Such moments occurred in the immediate aftermath of World War II, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and during and after the Reagan administration when the Freeze Movement developed.  But these moments didn’t last.

In order to permit real progress toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, our generation must sense that a HUGE problem exists, a problem that could end all life as we know it. As a former professor once put it to me: We must somehow create a sacred space of virtual horror.

Second, a broad-based disarmament movement will need leaders, but too few job opportunities exist for young people in the arms control field.  

In addition to the lack of opportunities, a career in arms control may be less appealing than other issues competing for our generation’s attention because young people don’t want to fight the same battles that arms controllers have been fighting for the past 50 years.  This isn’t to say these debates weren’t important.  Our generation would do well to appreciate and learn from what Linton’s generation did to keep us safe during and after the Cold War.  But as one colleague my age put it to me, we want to learn from the past, but not feel doomed to repeat it.

Remember the F-22? After years of back and forth over its cost and utility, Congress voted in 2009 to cease additional procurement of the plane. Those that were purchased already have done little more than gather rust since their introduction into the Air Force in 2005.

Early this month, though, the aircraft were reportedly readied for action, just in case, and Gen Norton Schwartz, USAF chief of staff, told Congress that he expected the F-22s to be employed in what was still a hypothetical operation in Libya. Certainly, if the planes have feelings their lonely hearts were aflutter at the possibility of their first big trip into the fray.

It was not to be, however. Schwartz, reporting again to Congress, said yesterday that the reason F-22 fighters have not been used to attack air defenses or counter Libyan jets is because they’re not based in the region.

Well, okay… benefit of the doubt… but there could be some other reasons, as well.

Stephen Trimble speculates that this particular battle may have come a bit too early for the Raptor:

True, the F-22 fleet can drop two joint direct attack munitions or eight small diameter bombs. However, six years after declaring initial operational capability, the F-22 is still waiting for a radar that picks up targets on the ground. The air-to-ground mode for the Northrop Grumman APG-77 radar is nearing the end of a long testing phase, and retrofits for the fleet should start at the end of this year. Until then, the F-22’s primary targeting sensor is effectively blind to ground targets after the aircraft takes off.

In a statement that seems to reinforce Trimble’s speculation, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley noted yesterday that the F-22 has “some air-to-ground capability, though it is optimized for air-to-air engagements.” This would render the plane of little use in Libya, where the vast majority of operations have been focused on air-to-ground strikes. The F-15E, by comparison, has the ability to drop laser-guided bombs on moving ground targets.

According to DoD Buzz, the U.S.’ F-16, F-15E, F/A-18G, AV-8B and A-10, Britain’s Eurofighter Typhoon and Tornado, and France’s Rafale and Mirage have appeared in Libya so far. They are joined by B-2 Stealth bombers, B-1 Lancers, and AC-130 gunships, as well as a variety of intelligence and command and control planes.

Fresh off his failure to defeat the New START treaty, last week Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) organized a letter signed by 40 other Republican Senators warning President Obama that he must consult with Congress before altering nuclear weapons guidance to allow for deeper reductions below New START levels.  

Senator Kyl is right that the Senate should be consulted on these issues, as it was throughout the formulation of the Nuclear Posture Review and during the New START negotiations.  However, the letter is a transparent attempt to obstruct the President’s authority to issue new guidance and engage in future negotiations with the Russians.  

Last year Republicans on the House Strategic Forces Subcommittee succeeded in attaching an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that would have placed limitations on the President’s ability to negotiate and implement reductions in U.S. nuclear forces below New START levels.  A significantly watered down version of the provision is included in the final version of the FY 2011 defense bill.  Kyl’s letter likely presages continued Republican efforts to impose legislative constraints on the President’s flexibility to determine appropriate U.S. force levels during the upcoming mark ups of the FY 2012 Defense Authorization Bill.

Kyl of course will not support further reductions under any circumstances.  But a key near term goal for the administration and its supporters should be to encourage other GOP signatories of the letter, including some Senators who supported New START, to keep an open mind about the next steps in U.S. nuclear policy.  Such outreach must include substantive responses to the age-old canards raised in the letter…  

Lower Is Better

The letter warns that “very low levels of nuclear forces, such as the arbitrary levels of 500 or 1000 warheads per side advocated by some in the international arms control community, would have important and as yet unknown consequences for nuclear stability.”  Yet what country would not be deterred at such levels?  And if a country couldn’t be deterred by a U.S. arsenal of 500-1000 nuclear weapons, what logic presumes that they would be deterred by a much larger U.S. arsenal of 5,000 weapons?  As James Acton outlines in his new Aldephi Paper, deterrence and stability can be maintained at lower levels of nuclear weapons.

It’s a MAD world

Though hard to swallow, the fact remains that the United States is, and will continue to be, vulnerable to nuclear attack so long as nuclear weapons exist.  Kyl and the nuclear hawks propose to escape this vulnerability by building new nuclear weapons, developing impenetrable missile defenses, threatening to use nuclear weapons against a wide array of threats, and maintaining sufficient nuclear forces to launch a disarming first strike against any potential adversary (or in the case of Russia at least feign such a capability).  

But a nuclear posture premised on primacy at the expense of tried and true measures to reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons would endanger U.S. national security.  For example, the quest to devise new and better ways to negate an adversary’s deterrent could increase their incentive to strike first in a crisis, thereby undermining deterrence. That’s one of the reasons the New START agreement is so important.  The reductions it requires (though modest) and the predictability and stability that it engenders steps us further away from the nuclear precipice.  

Such a posture is also useless against 21st century threats such as the threat of nuclear terrorism.  In fact, it would likely weaken the international cooperation we need to rein in rogue states such as Iran and North Korea and prevent nuclear terrorism.  It could also prompt additional states to acquire nuclear weapons to protect themselves against a potential U.S. attack, thereby undermining nonproliferation.  On the flip side, we can continue to assure our allies that we remain committed to their security in ways that are far more credible than retaining excessive numbers of nuclear weapons.

Congress should be consulted, but

Future U.S. arms control negotiators should retain maximum flexibility to negotiate treaty provisions in the best interests of the United States. The Senate will have an opportunity to vote any treaty up or down.

***

The ongoing crisis in Japan is a chilling illustration of the old adage that what can go wrong, will go wrong.  The same logic applies to nuclear weapons, only the devastation would be orders of magnitude larger than what we’re seeing Japan.  As Robert McNamara put it in the Academy Award winning documentary The Fog of War, the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.

In light of this danger the U.S. should be reorienting its nuclear policy to reflect the fact that changing technologic, strategic, and geopolitical circumstances have made it possible and essential for the U.S. to reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons.  The Nuclear Posture Review, New START agreement, Nuclear Security Summit, and most recent NPT Review Conference are all steps in the right direction.  

Now its time to take the next steps.