A few weeks ago I noted that it was ironic that Senator Jon Kyl has been accusing the Obama administration of being weak on verification in its pursuit of a New START agreement considering his past lackadaisical approach to this topic.  Apparently the Senator’s inconsistency knows no bounds.

In a November 21 speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Kyl warned of the consequences of allowing START I to expire on December 5.  “The U.S. will lose a significant source of information that has allowed it to have confidence in its ability to understand Russian strategic nuclear forces,” he proclaimed.

Arms control advocates have been raising concerns about the impending disappearance of START I’s verification, monitoring, and inspection provisions for years.  The same cannot be said of Sen. Kyl, whose sudden admiration for START I’s verification scheme contrasts sharply with his position on the Bush administration’s 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which contained no such verification procedures.  In praising SORT on the Senate floor in April 2003, Sen. Kyl stated:

This treaty is a masterstroke. It represents, and, I am sure, will be sent as ushering in a wholly new approach to arms control for a wholly new era. The simplicity of this treaty is a marvel. It is extremely brief, indeed just three pages long. It is shorn of the tortured benchmarks, sublimits, arcane definitions and monitoring provisions that weighed down past arms control treaties.

In addition, Sen. Kyl was one of 50 mostly Republican Senators to vote against an amendment proposed by Sen. Kerry to add verification requirements to SORT.

So he was against verification before he was for it?

What’s the cause of his new-found verification religion?  Has it something to do with a Democrat being in the White House?

Kyl’s November 21 floor speech also tries to blame the Obama administration for Russia’s plans to deploy the road-mobile RS-24 missile, a new, multiple-warhead version of the single warhead SS-27.  

Yet the Bush administration did not make an issue out of Russia’s development of the RS-24.  This was in keeping with the conclusions of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which declared that it was no longer appropriate to size and configure U.S. nuclear forces in relation to the Russian arsenal.  

As Amb. Linton Brooks, a former Republican official and negotiator of the START I agreement, noted at an October 26 event on START at the United States Institute of Peace: “The fact that the Secretary of Defense in the last administration said both publically and privately that we didn’t care [about the RS-24] may have suggested to them [the Russians] that it was ok….We had a long time…to call them on that and we as a government chose not to.”

Sen. Kyl claims that the Obama administration has given next to no consideration of how to bridge the gap between the expiration of START I and entry into force of New START.  This is simply not true.  As numerous Obama administration officials have noted, the two sides have been negotiating a bridging agreement in parallel to the new Treaty to cover the gap.  The Administration has not, however, divulged the details of a bridge agreement that is still being negotiated.

Sen. Kyl ends his speech by noting that “the U.S. would have been very well served with a simple 5 year extension of the 1991 Agreement, as the treaty allowed.”  Earlier versions of Senator Kyl would likely have opposed this position, as he apparently had no qualms with the Bush administration’s decision not to seek an extension of START I in 2007 and 2008.  

In any event, the time for talk of a simple five year extension has long since past, thanks in large part to the Bush administration’s unwillingness to consider it.  

In a recent controversial article in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh points to growing radicalization within Pakistan’s military that could endanger the security of its nuclear arsenal…

Though the United States has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of seizing Pakistani nuclear weapons or materials and maintains confidence in the security of Pakistan’s arsenal, Hersh reports that the Obama administration has been negotiating “highly sensitive” understandings that would allow specially-trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in a crisis. According to Hersh, the secrecy surrounding these agreements arises from a growing antipathy and history of distrust toward America within Pakistan, which has only intensified as a result of U.S. pressure on the Pakistan Army to take more aggressive action against Taliban enclaves inside Pakistan.

Hersh is right that the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is cause for concern. Though nuclear safeguards are in place, primarily to keep a confrontation with India from escalating too quickly, these same safeguards could make Pakistan’s arsenal more vulnerable to terrorists. Extensive procedures that require warheads to be stored separate from their triggers and delivery vehicles leave these elements most exposed, as they are constantly being moved and reassembled. Andrew St. Denis noted in August that most of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities lie in and around areas populated by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen recently wrote in Arms Control Today about the “lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders” in Pakistan. “Insiders have facilitated terrorist attacks. Suicide bombings have occurred at air force bases that reportedly serve as nuclear weapons storage sites. It is difficult to ignore such trends,” he said.

Michael Krepon, however, points out that Hersh’s record, though relatively solid in other respects, is mediocre at best with regard to Pakistan. Unfortunately, writes Krepon, Hersh’s “sourcing is weak and his conclusions are suspect.” If his story were true, “those ‘specially trained American units’ can now forget about helping Pakistan to secure its arsenal: Public revelation of such an agreement makes it about as palatable within Pakistan as changing that nation’s religious preference.”

Still partial to the argument that our deterrent can’t be maintained without designing and producing new nuclear warheads?  Still think the authors of the 2002 National Academy of Sciences report and the 2006 JASON pit lifetime study belong in the loony bin?  Then you’re probably not going to like the September 2009 JASON study on Life Extension Programs (LEPs), the unclassified version of which was released today.  According to the executive summary:

JASON finds no evidence that accumulation of changes incurred from aging and LEPs have increased risk to certification of today’s deployed nuclear warheads

This finding is a direct consequence of the excellent work of the people in the US nuclear weapons complex supported and informed by the tools and methods developed through the Stockpile Stewardship program. Some aging issues have already been resolved. The others that have been identified can be resolved through LEP approaches similar to those employed to date. To maintain certification, military requirements for some stockpile warheads have been modified. The modifications are the result of improved understanding of original weapon performance, not because of aging or other changes. If desired, all but one of the original major performance requirements could also be met through LEP approaches similar to those employed to date.

Lifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in LEPs to date.

The report discusses details and challenges for each stockpile system.

My advice to the remaining skeptics: It’s one…two…three strikes you’re out at the old…ball…game!

Guest Post by Alex Bollfrass (Click here to read Freezer Burn, Part II)

News broke last week that prosecutors are asking to have William Jefferson (D.-Louisiana) locked up for some 13 years.  You may remember that he stashed about $90,000 in dirty money in his freezer.

If you thought that a bribe to a foreign vice-president was the most unappetizing thing stuffed in with the pie crusts, read Thomas Schelling’s “A world without nuclear weapons?” in the current issue of Daedalus (gated). In his telling, one of the major barriers to a world without nuclear weapons is his refrigeration capacity:

“[E]nough plutonium to make a bomb could be hidden in the freezing compartment of my refrigerator.”

While this observation about the size of the plutonium in a nuclear bomb may be true, it tells us little about the feasibility of nuclear disarmament.  

Schelling’s point is that if sufficient fissile material for a bomb is small enough to fit into a freezer, an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons could never be verified.  But hiding weapons is only part of a cheater’s problem.  There are additional formidable obstacles that would prompt anyone contemplating reconstituting or developing nuclear weapons in a disarmament regime to think very carefully.

Cheating on a disarmament agreement could happen in one of three ways:

1. Cheating at the outset and retaining undeclared warheads or fissile materials;

2. Clandestinely producing the materials for a nuclear arsenal after disarmament had been accomplished;

3. Diverting declared materials from nuclear energy facilities or from left-over fissile material stocks.

The last method is roughly equivalent to grabbing the money and dashing for the casino door.  The ploy would be immediately uncovered as all such facilities and stockpiles would be safeguarded far more closely than ex-Congressman Jefferson’s “take” in any self-respecting disarmament regime.  Such a cheater’s gain, if any, would be short-lived.  Either the other signatories would undertake collective action with conventional military forces to stop the program, or those with the potential capabilities would rearm themselves, leaving the world no worse off than it is now. A rearmament effort triggered this way would be unfortunate, but unlikely. Furthermore, it would be comparatively stable because the governments would be building a defense-oriented deterrent, as opposed to seeking a coercive advantage.

The middle course of action? Check with this bloke. With on-site challenge inspections and national means of verification, such an action would likely be discovered relatively quickly, just as the Qom facility was uncovered and has every covert weapons program to date.  The world may not have acted on South Africa’s or Israel’s or Pakistan’s covert weapon programs, but the United States and others were certainly aware of what was going on – even without an on-site challenge inspection scheme.  

The first option, Schelling’s path, is only available to the nine countries that already have enough unsafeguarded plutonium or highly enriched uranium to make a bomb: China, France, Great Britain, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States.

In practice, the majority of these countries would almost certainly be caught.  Their holdings of materials are modest enough that their declarations of weapons and stocks could be confirmed with great certainty using a combination of forensic verification techniques.  The only two exceptions are the US and Russia, both of which produced massive amounts of fissile material during the Cold War. For these two exceptions, the margin of error that could reasonably be expected from thorough verification procedures amounts to several hundreds of bombs worth of uncertainty. If we agreed to implement nuclear disarmament tomorrow, we or the Russians could presumably squirrel away at least several dozen bombs (or at least the fissile materials to make them).

Will this prove to be nuclear disarmament’s fatal vulnerability – a la Siegfried’s exposed back?

It need not be. That margin of error can be reduced by an increase in transparency, coupled with the healing powers of time. Long before moving to the White House, Steve Fetter wrote “Verifying Nuclear Disarmament” as the Stimson Center’s Occasional Paper #29 in 1996. He identified a remedy, which is worth quoting at length from the paper:

A data exchange could help build confidence between the parties even before the accuracy of the data was verified. An early exchange of data is particularly important because it would force governments to make decisions about compliance with reporting requirements well in advance of possible disarmament agreements. A government that possesses thousands of nuclear weapons and has made no near-term commitment to disarmament is less likely to be suspected of falsifying records or hiding weapons than a country that has few weapons and is obliged to eliminate the remainder, simply because a country with thousands of warheads would have little incentive to cheat.

It is also important to begin verifying declarations as far in advance of a disarmament agreement as possible. As the number of nuclear weapons falls into the hundreds, states would be far more likely to have confidence in a declaration whose accuracy had been verified for years and for tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, than one whose verification had begun only recently and only after thousands of warheads had been dismantled. Failure to verify the dismantling and consolidation of the huge US and Russian nuclear stockpiles could undermine severely the two sides’ confidence in a declaration made later about much smaller numbers of weapons. There is little pressure for warhead-verification today because current and planned stockpiles are so large as to make existing uncertainties unimportant. But unless the nuclear powers begin now to describe and verify their warhead stockpiles, when the need for verification is not pressing, they will have failed to lay a foundation that is strong enough to bear the weight of a disarmament regime.

Data on the history of stockpiles and the operation of warhead-related facilities cannot be verified directly, of course, but it could be checked for internal consistency, and for its consistency with archived intelligence data. If, for example, US satellites had detected the movement of nuclear warheads from a particular Russian facility on a particular date in the past, this could be checked against the records exchanged between the two countries. Indeed, such records should improve the value of archived data by confirming or contradicting past interpretations by intelligence agencies. The fact that countries would not know what intelligence information might be available would act as an incentive to provide complete and accurate data.

As with declarations on delivery vehicles, data on the current status of nuclear warheads would be verified by regular and short-notice inspections of declared facilities, combined with challenge inspections to verify the absence of warheads at other locations. For example, inspectors could count the number of warheads in a particular storage bunker and compare this to the number listed in the data exchange.

If President Obama sees nuclear disarmament as a serious destination, and not just rhetorical decoration for traditional arms control and nonproliferation, these kinds of early transparency measures should be included in the next round of negotiations with the Russians. So should tactical nuclear weapons.

In the most optimistic abolition scenario, ex-Congressman Jefferson would find himself released into a world contemplating the final destruction of the remaining nuclear weapons when he retires as ex-convict Jefferson several decades from now. That is a long time to devise technologies and procedures for verifying US and Russian fissile material stocks. Whether the nuclear-armed countries of that era will have the confidence to take such a leap depends on how seriously we prepare for this possibility in the next few years.

Alex Bollfrass works for the Unblocking the Road to Zero project at the Stimson Center, where he occasionally comes across suspiciously plutonium-like materials in the office refrigerator.