One year ago in Prague, President Obama pledged that the Nuclear Posture Review “will put an end to Cold War thinking” and “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.”

The Review, which was released today after nearly a year of analysis, outlines many important and valuable steps that the U.S. will take toward that end.  “While the Review could have been bolder in some areas, according to Deputy Director of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Kingston Reif, “it constructively reorients U.S. 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.”

Overall, the Nuclear Posture Review is a significant improvement over the two previous Nuclear Posture Reviews conducted since the end of the Cold War.  “The encouraging steps outlined in the report should not be viewed as the end of the journey toward reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, but they point us in the right direction,” said Executive Director John Isaacs.

On the positive side, the Nuclear Posture Review places preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism atop the U.S. nuclear agenda.  It also significantly reduces the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security by stating that the “fundamental” role of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the U.S. and its allies and limiting the circumstances under which the U.S. would contemplate using nuclear weapons.  Both of these measures will be helpful in strengthening the U.S. hand at the upcoming Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in May.  Furthermore, the Review reaffirms that the U.S. will not conduct nuclear explosive tests and rejects the development of new nuclear weapons.  The Review also supports further discussions with Moscow on even deeper bilateral reductions in U.S. and Russian arsenals – including non-deployed and non-strategic (i.e. tactical nuclear weapons) – beyond those called for in the New START agreement.

Though the positives significantly outweigh the negatives, the report stops short of saying that the “sole” purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the U.S. and its allies nor does it call for the U.S. to adopt a “no first use” policy.  The U.S. does not need nuclear weapons for any other purpose but deterrence.  A “sole purpose” and “no first use” declaration would have further strengthened the credibility of the U.S. conventional deterrent and reduced the incentives that other states might have to acquire nuclear weapons to protect themselves from a U.S. first strike.

The Review also does not recommend that the U.S. abandon its current launch on warning or launch under attack posture.  Maintaining such a posture increases the chances of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch.

Press Contact: Mary Slosson, Herbert Scoville Peace Fellow, mslosson@armscontrolcenter.org 202-543-4100, ext. 2114

In recent weeks calls to further sanction Iran for its nuclear program have been on the rise in a number of high profile op-eds, in blogs, and in rhetoric from the White House.  

For example, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) recently stated that it is now time for ‘moving beyond engagement’.  Berman is a key author and supporter of unilateral U.S. sanctions legislation that has passed both the House and the Senate and could be sent to President Obama’s desk for approval soon.  Berman writes that the legislation will ‘impose severe penalties on companies that sell refined petroleum products to Iran or support the development of Iran’s domestic refining capacity.’

David Milliband, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, said that ‘proportionate and reversible’ multilateral sanctions ‘are needed urgently’ to affect a change in Iran’s behavior.  In the blogosphere, the Heritage Foundation is calling for ‘extremely strong international sanctions that would impose excruciating economic pain and threaten the regime’s continued hold on power.’  In a (sadly) similar vein, Hillary Clinton called for ‘sanctions that will bite’.  Although varying in the level and form of sanctions called for, both sides of the political spectrum appear to be coalescing around the view that tougher measures are required because engagement has failed.  

Yet dialogue should have always been framed as a long-term pursuit, not something that was ever going to solve problems in any immediate time-frame…

In February 2009, Norma Percy, one of the producers of the BBC’s fantastic ‘Iran and The West’ series, reminded us that engagement with Iran would not be an easy task, pointing out that ‘all previous attempts at talks between Iran and the West have ended as the dialogue of the deaf.’  After three decades of mistrust and animosity, the notion that a young and charismatic U.S president could quickly change the status quo – no matter how committed he may be to changing the American relationship with Iran – was not a realistic one.

U.S. policy, at least from the perspective of Iran, appears to suffer from a case of multiple personality disorder.  On the one hand, the Obama administration has made a sincere effort to both directly and indirectly (see here, here and here, for example) reach out to and engage in dialogue with the Iranian regime.

Yet these overtures also come against the backdrop of Congressional efforts to impose harsh new sanctions, public White House proclamations that keep all military options on the table, and the U.S dismissing Ahmadinijad’s own ‘offers’ of engagement (here,here and here).  These factors  gives the upper hand to the hardliners in Iran who argue that Obama’s offers of engagement are a ‘ploy’.

Meanwhile, the Iranian leaderships’ brutal crackdown of last summer’s demonstrations against alleged electoral fraud, the revelation of Iran’s secret uranium enrichment facility near Qom, and Tehran’s rejection of an offer from the United States and its allies to ship its stock of low-enriched uranium abroad for further enrichment and refinement, have done little to dispel concerns in the U.S. that Iran is bent on developing nuclear weapons.

Given these developments, it is easy to see why sanctions appear to be an attractive option for U.S. policy makers at the moment.  It enables them to appear proactive in responding to the current situation.  However, neither unilateral or multilateral sanctions have historically achieved much success in changing Iran’s thinking, thus its hard to see what gains will result from more being imposed.

If Obama signs off on unilateral U.S. gasoline sanctions or if he is able to convince the Chinese to support a UN administered multilateral sanctions package, they will merely make future calls for negotiations seem more incredulous than ever to the Iranian leadership.  In addition, there are compelling arguments which suggest that further sanctions will strengthen the regime at the expense of the Iranian people.  

As Roger Cohen pointed out in the New York Times last year, ‘France and Germany fought three wars in 70 years before the bright idea dawned of enfolding their problem into something larger: the European Union. The United States and Iran have not gone to war but have a relationship of psychotic mistrust. The answer can only be the same: Broaden the context.’  

This lesson of history suggests that it is essential that the U.S peg its approach to engagement to a medium and long-term strategy in the region that also covers other issues of mutual interest.  Such an approach is fundamental if there is to be any hope of introducing transparency and building confidence in Washington and Tehran’s relationship.

Bill Matthews had a good article in Friday’s Air Force Times on the future of U.S. strategic bombers under New START (or the Prague Treaty as I’ve been encouraged to call it).

As just about everyone who has followed the news on arms control over the past week is aware, New START counts each bomber as one warhead against the treaty’s limit of 1550 warheads.  The reason, writes Matthews is that…

the treaty permits “direct monitoring of warheads. In the past we have looked at delivery vehicles, now we will be able to look inside the missiles” and count the warheads, [Tom] Collina said.

That probably helps explain the scheme that counts bombers as just one weapon, he said. Typically bomber-delivered nuclear weapons are kept in storage, not on the bombers. “You can’t look in the bomber and see the weapons, so they had to choose an arbitrary number. They chose one,” he said.

I think this gets it about right, although we do know that the U.S. wanted to count and verify the actual number of warheads on U.S. and Russian bomber bases.  However, Russia refused, whether it was because (1) they didn’t want on-site inspections at their bomber bases, (2) they did’t count warheads at bomber bases to be operationally deployed under the Moscow Treaty (unlike the U.S.) and wanted to continue to do so under New START, (3) some other reason or (4) some combination thereof.  So a compromise had to be found.  And that compromise was “one”.

The extent to which the treaty “overcounts” or “undercounts” deployed warheads hinges on one’s definition of “operationally deployed,” while the exact number of warheads by which the treaty overcounts or undercounts in turn will be a function of how many bombers each side decides to retain as part of its New START force posture.

The reality is that neither the U.S. nor Russia actually deploy warheads on bombers anymore, and New START largely reflects that reality. Thus, on one level, counting each bomber as one warhead against the treaty’s warhead limit overstates the total number of U.S. and Russian operationally deployed warheads.

To the extent that one believes warheads deployed at active bomber bases should count as deployed, New START undercounts warheads. But even if one takes this view it’s not as if New START is going to leave the U.S. completely in the dark about the Russian bomber force.  NTM will still allow us to track the number of Russian bombers.  While NTM will not allow us to monitor the number of warheads at Russian bomber bases, 15 years of START I implementation has provided us with quite a bit of information about what Russian bombers can carry.

In any event, As Steve Pifer notes, New START’s counting rule for bombers is not a fundamental departure from how START I counted bomber weapons:

That treaty attributed heavy bombers equipped to carry air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) with fewer ALCMs than they could actually carry, and it attributed bombers not equipped to carry ALCMs as carrying only one warhead…This push for preferential treatment for bombers in the belief that they are the least destabilizing leg of the strategic Triad has been a central feature of U.S. arms control policy for some 40 years.[emphasis mine.]

Bombers are inherently less destabilizing than missiles because they take much longer to deliver warheads to their target and can be recalled.

For all these reasons, neither side is likely to get a strategic leg up on the other via the bomber counting rule, as some have already alleged.   In fact, the type of mutual suspicion and worst-case scenario planning that could prompt the maintenance of current force levels or even a buildup is precisely why the predictability, stability, and transparency that New START will provide is so important.

Some conservatives might conclude that political hay can be made by arguing that the bomber counting rule will allow Russia to deploy excess warheads.  Yet not only will they have to gainsay the reasons cited above, but they will also have to contend with the fact that during the SORT debate they had no qualms with the Bush administration’s view that it didn’t matter how Russia structured its nuclear forces.  As Colin Powell put it at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on the Moscow Treaty on July 9, 2002:

What President Bush said…to President Putin:….We are going there [to 1,700-2,200 warheads] unilaterally….So you can do whatever you think you have to do for your security. You can MIRV your missiles, you can keep more, you can go lower. Do what you think you need. This is what we know we need and we are going to this level.

Any way you slice it, the U.S. is much better off with a treaty that counts bombers as carrying one warhead than it would be without any treaty at all.

UPDATE 7/10: If anyone has a strategic advantage as a result of the bomber counting rule, it’s the U.S., which has more nuclear-capable bombers than Russia.

Was it just an April Fools joke? Yesterday the Associated Press reported that the United States had test-fired a nuclear-capable Trident missile as part of a military drill with Saudi Arabia. The launch may have come in response to Saudi and Gulf Arab concerns over Iran’s evolving nuclear weapons program.

A defense official in Washington confirmed that the missile launch took place late last week and was part of a demonstration. The official also stated that U.S. Missile Defense Agency head Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly was present. The Pentagon has since denied that any missile was fired and states that while O’Reilly was in the region last week, he was not present at any launch.

Regardless of the ‘he said she said’ of it all, the news draws attention to the recent beefing up of defenses around Iran. The recently accelerated initiative, originally launched by the Bush administration, involves nearly the entire Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait…

In a visit to the Kingdom in March, Defense Secretary Robert Gates discussed bolstering Saudi air and missile defense capabilities, as well as more speedy weapons sales in the region.

The U.S. hopes to reassure Gulf allies with upgraded Patriot missiles on land and more U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf capable of destroying missiles in flight. While the Patriot missile systems were originally deployed in the region to shoot down aircraft, they have taken on a new role.

This recent effort to bolster security in allied Arab nations in the Gulf has been touted by U.S. officials as strictly defensive. It “is meant to act as a buffer against potential Iranian retaliation to new economic penalties related to its atomic activities and as an answer to growing perceptions that Tehran is the region’s ascendant military power,” according to GSN. The deployments may also serve to discourage Israel from a potential military strike on Iran and deter an expanded nuclear arms race in the region. Saudi Arabia has long warned of the potential for a nuclear arms race in the Gulf region if Iran were to gain a nuclear weapon.

“Iran is clearly seen as a very serious threat by those on the other side of the Gulf front, and indeed, it has been a catalyst for the implementation of the architecture that we envision and have now been trying to implement,” said General Petraeus in January.