Last week, Politico reporter Jen DiMascio wrote about the ascension of American women into the highest ranks of arms control. The piece, superciliously titled “Arms Control: No Longer Just for Men” – a title DiMascio probably didn’t choose herself – explained how powerful women like Ellen Tauscher and Rose Gottemoeller are working to dismantle the big bad bombs the boys built. “If men have largely built the world’s nuclear arsenals,” read the article, “a small corps of women is working to dismantle them.”

This idea comports with the “more women in charge = more peace” theory of war, which is offensive, inaccurate, and retrograde. Men are rarely suggested to be genetically-predisposed warmongers; more often than not, they make decisions about conflict as rationally as they can, right? Why must women inevitably suffer the indignity of being talked about as intrinsic peacemakers?

DiMascio gives Secretary of State Hillary Clinton much of the credit for staffing her top ranks with women, but in 2009, does it really take a woman to hire a woman? When it comes to national security, it might. The most important point in the article came from Joe Cirincione. “Ever been to an arms control meeting?” he asked. “It’s all old white guys.” Joe is right…

According to NOH’s calculations, of the articles published on nuclear weapons in top-tier policy journals during 2009, only 9 percent were by women. Take a look at the links on NOH’s blogroll: there aren’t many women blogging about these issues, either.

Representation within the military and academia – key pipelines to top level policy jobs – isn’t much better. As Paula Broadwell, Deepti Choubey, and Laura Holgate wrote last year, women make up 14 percent of the armed services but only 5 percent of general officers. Only 26 percent of political science professors in the United States today are female despite the fact that women comprise more than half of all international affairs students. The highest ranks of arms control may currently be filled by women, but the jobs that lead to those ranks are still overwhelmingly dominated by men.

The gender imbalance in national security is partially due to the gravitation of women toward fields such as international development and human rights. This is not entirely surprising since honor killings, sex trafficking, and female genital mutilation arouse understandable passion and anger within most women. The belief that women are better suited to work on these “softer” security problems is pervasive, even among women themselves.

DiMascio’s piece draws on this attitude by noting that while women were not highly involved in the process of building nuclear weapons, they are now largely the driving force behind President Obama’s vision of a world without them.

Women in leadership positions make decisions about war and peace based on the same criteria as their male counterparts – national interest, perception of threat, cost-benefit analysis, legal norms, historical understanding, international and domestic politics, and much more. Those who argue that “Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution” mean to elevate women’s status, but they actually diminish it by erecting a barrier between women’s allegedly innate predilections and real-world political violence, which has a body of study (and practice) that stretches back thousands of years. If there is indeed any understanding of war that has developed over time, women are not barred from comprehending it simply because they are women.

Ellen Tauscher and Rose Gottemoeller aren’t working to reduce nuclear weapons because they are women. They are doing it because they believe it will make the United States more secure. The fact that they happen to be women is entirely beside the point.

Via Max Bergmann over at the The Wonk Room, today’s Wall Street Journal editorial on Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech predictably includes far more misinformation than truth about the “New START” negotiations…

For example, according to the Journal, U.S. ICBMs “are being fitted with conventional weapons.”  If that is the case, then apparently the editors know more about U.S. strategic forces than STRATCOM Commander Gen. Kevin Chilton and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright.

The Journal also claims that with the loss of U.S. monitoring at Votkinsk, the U.S. will have no means of verifying Russian mobile missile deployments.  This would be true if monitoring at Votkinsk was our only way to count these missiles.  It is not.

First, let’s not forget that it was because of the Bush administration that Rose Gottemoeller and her team were put in such a tight spot re: Votkinsk in the first place.

Second, remember that national technical means (NTM) is the basis for most of the information we get about Russian nuclear forces.  Cooperative verification measures supplement and confirm information gleaned from NTM.   Under START I, Votkinsk was but one of many cooperative provisions used to count mobile missiles.  Other procedures included data exchanges, notifications, location restrictions, and on-site inspections.  

Though New START is still being negotiated, it will likely include an updated version of START I-style data exchanges, notifications, and inspections which will continue to allow us to monitor Russia’s mobile missiles.  And of course, we will still have NTM.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Steve Pifer elaborated on this point at a briefing the Center co-hosed with the Arms Control Association earlier this week.  As Pifer put it:

I think the Votkinsk provision…perhaps at this point, we no longer need that. And so the verification provisions really need to be driven by the actual limitations that you agree to, and to the extent that you have different limitations than were in the START treaty…I think in some ways this new agreement is going to be simpler than the START treaty.  That may impose, in some ways, less demanding verification requirements.  And that gives the side the opportunity, then, to eliminate the inspections if they make no contribution to the overall understanding of the other side’s compliance with the treaty.

But you have to give it to the Journal: at least they’re consistent (well sort of).  When news broke in May 2002 that the Bush administration planned to sign a legally-binding treaty with Russia (aka the Moscow Treaty), the Journal called it a “A Gift for Mr. Putin”.  That’s right: Even the Bush administration’s largely nonexistent arms control agenda was too liberal for the Wall Street Journal!

Still, the editors couldn’t help but praise the treaty for its indifference:

At least this one does relatively little mischief. It is only three-and-one-half pages long, and a third of that is rhetorical throat-clearing. The pact does nothing to restrict defenses, and it allows either side to deploy the warheads that remain as each sees fit.

That’s right: Praise a Republican administration when it says it doesn’t care how Russia deploys its forces, yet pitch a fit when a Democratic administration attempts to negotiate an updated and adapted verification infrastructure to ensure we know what the Russians are doing, a task made all the more difficult by the previous Republican administration’s bumbling.    

Below the jump are a few responses issued by bioweapons policy experts in response to the Obama administration’s announcement on Wednesday and release of its biothreat strategy. Longer strides are being called for…

Dr. Marie Isabelle Chevrier – Professor at UT-Dallas, member of the Center’s Scientists Working Group on Biological and Chemical Weapons, and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Biological Weapons Prevention Project in Geneva:

Ellen Tauscher’s speech to the Meeting of the States Parties of the Biological Weapons Convention was much anticipated by delegations. Yet there was little excitement or enthusiasm by the delegation following her speech. Delegations and NGO observers welcomed the change in tone from earlier US interventions during the Bush administration, contrasting it, in particular, with the strident address by John Bolton to the 5th Review Conference in 2001. Nevertheless the lack of specificity of proposals in Tauscher’s address was notable. People wondered about the meaning of language in the statement such as “compliance diplomacy” and “robust bilateral compliance discussion.” Optimists greeted the statement with hope that the statement will be followed by real engagement absent the arrogance of the past while pessimists found little if anything in the statement that would lead to real policy changes from the Bush administration. The inclusion of CBMs on an open website was generally welcome, as a small measure of transparency but not something that would likely lead to real confidence in compliance. Many NGOs are looking forward to greater transparency among all stakeholders rather than mere “bilateral…discussions.”

Dr. Amy E. Smithson – Senior Fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies:

Tauscher tabled a modest, constructive set of proposals, but given the $49 billion in U.S. biodefense spending since 2001, the international community will want more in terms of transparency from Washington than just posting the US confidence-building declarations?already available to all member governments?on the web and inviting one person to Ft. Detrick.   New money earmarked for building international disease surveillance and reporting capacities would have more emphatically conveyed U.S. support for thorough implementation of the International Health Regulations.  If the Obama administration hopes to claim the leadership mantle in the biological nonproliferation arena, they will have to bring something much bolder to the table.  The sooner they do, the better.

Dr. Jonathan Tucker, Senior Fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies:

Although none of the elements of the U.S. strategy are new, taken together they provide a comprehensive and cooperative approach to the prevention of biological threats, both natural and deliberate. The main disappointment is the strategy’s lack of ambition with regard to strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention, both with respect to the treaty’s institutional deficit and the festering suspicions of non-compliance by a few member states. The measures proposed to address compliance concerns—increased transparency, confidence-building measures, and bilateral diplomacy—appear too weak to make much of a difference.

UPDATE: NOH’s bad – we should have acknowledged that Armchair Generalist was the first to post on this.

The Obama administration in Geneva yesterday formally revealed its new strategy for strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).

Anticipating the release of the White House’s “National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats,” Dr. Jonathan Tucker, a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told Global Security Newswire last Friday: “What’s important is the U.S. government is giving political attention to this issue, and making it clear the U.S. is not a one-trick pony and that in addition to the very ambitious nuclear agenda, the government is also very concerned about biological weapons.”

Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher did indeed proclaim the administration’s commitment to the issue. However, the strategy has drawn criticism for reaffirming the Bush administration’s opposition to creating an international monitoring system to verify treaty compliance…

It is important to understand why the Bush administration announced eight years ago that a BWC verification protocol was “not in the best interests of the United States and many other countries.” First, the Bush team felt that the protocol’s provisions were overly influenced by particular nations’ demands. According to FAS, Iran, who played a key role in the deliberations of the Ad-Hoc Group tasked with drafting the protocol, “insisted throughout that all export control regimes, and particularly the Australia Group arrangements, be totally abolished.” In addition, according to Dr. Tucker, Russia sought to define the “types and quantities” of pathogens and toxins banned by the agreement, thereby limiting its scope. Russia and Iran continue to seek such provisions.

An intrusive verification protocol was also perceived by the Bush administration, and perhaps now by the Obama administration, as a burden to biodefense research and the growth of the biotechnology industry. Although a broad interpretation of the BWC, particularly Article X, allows for the production of small amounts of hazardous biological agents for peaceful study, a verification protocol would subject the U.S. biodefense and biotechnology complex to “increased inspection costs and bureaucratic hurdles.” Moreover, the access required for inspections could also threaten to expose vulnerabilities in the U.S. biodefense shield or reveal lucrative pharma-industry secrets.

These concerns appear not to have changed since the Bush administration’s rejection of the verification protocol in November 2001. Meanwhile, biotechnology has continued to advance at a revolutionary pace, advanced techniques have been disseminated around the world and throughout populations, and the biological dual-use dilemma has been amplified. Given these trends, some doubt that effective monitoring through a verification protocol is possible. For this reason, Undersecretary Tauscher explained, “We have carefully reviewed previous efforts to develop a verification protocol and have determined that a legally binding protocol would not achieve meaningful verification or greater security.”

Verification protocol aside, the Obama administration’s new strategy contains a collection of objectives to mitigate biological threats. One of those objectives is to promote global health security, which includes providing assistance to other nations to bolster their disease surveillance, detection, diagnosis, and response programs. Such an approach links security with public health, thereby countering not only nefarious biological weapon threats but also natural infectious disease outbreaks. The White House strategy also includes a variety of confidence and transparency building measures.

But in a press release yesterday, the experts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies suggest it may take more far-reaching steps than are presented in the new strategy to truly impact the BWC. A close look at the White House strategy document makes it seem more like a reiteration of recommendations generally supporting biological threat reduction rather than a fresh roadmap for strengthening the BWC as an effective central pillar. In fact, the 23-page document’s emphasis on the BWC is limited to a brief pledge in the introduction to uphold the treaty’s obligations, fleeting mentions in a few bullet points, and a single subsection about the need to revitalize the BWC in one of the seven strategic objectives.

Is the United States the only nuclear power that is not modernizing its nuclear arsenal, as is often alleged by some defense hawks?  If by “modernization” we mean the regular production of new missiles and warheads, then yes; U.S. strategic forces…