Is there a link between the nuclear postures of the nuclear weapons states and nonproliferation?  

In their recent Op-Ed attacking President Obama’s approach toward nuclear weapons, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Richard Perle argued that there is such a link, but only in so far as the nuclear umbrella that the United States extends to protect its allies ensures that these allies do not have to acquire their own nuclear weapons.  They scoffed at another interpretation of this link, which is that in maintaining thousands of nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapons states, particularly the U.S. and Russia, increase the incentives other states have to acquire nuclear weapons and make it more difficult to, among other objectives, marshal international support to put added pressure on North Korea and Iran.  As Kyl and Perle put it:

There is a fashionable notion that if only we and the Russians reduced our nuclear forces, other nations would reduce their existing arsenals or abandon plans to acquire nuclear weapons altogether. This idea, an article of faith of the “soft power” approach to halting nuclear proliferation, assumes that the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces — or that India, Pakistan or China would respond with reductions of their own.

As I noted at the time, this fashionable notion is a straw man.  Over at Democracy Arsenal, David Shorr does a much better job than I did of explaining the relevance of U.S.-Russian nuclear reductions to stemming the spread of nuclear weapons.  “I don’t know anyone who believes that nuclear arms cuts will cause a spontaneous change of heart in Iranian or North Korean leaders,” writes Shorr, “but here’s what I do believe:

-that disarmament moves by the nuclear ‘haves’ will serve the ball into their court, lessening US policy as the topic of focus in nonproliferation diplomacy and putting the spotlight squarely on the nuclear wannabes

-that living up to our end of the bargain will give us a strong argument to draw greater international support and increased pressure on Iran and North Korea

-that no regime is immune to outside pressure and that such regimes have countervailing interests that weigh against building nuclear arsenals (otherwise there wouldn’t be such a hot debate in Iran over relations with the West)

-that moral authority must be combined with tough diplomacy and the remote but implicit threat of hard (conventional armed) power

-that we have many times more nuclear weapons than can be reasonably justified

-and that taking a hard line — preserving military strength regardless of strategic rationale, issuing demands rather than bargaining hard over possible solutions — makes even less of an impact and offers zero possibility of inducing cooperation.

 “In other words,” Shorr concludes, “we have no choice.”

The key takeaway here is that we do not know for sure that U.S. and Russian nuclear reductions will set the example or have the impact that we hope.  However, we have very little to lose and everything to gain from testing this hypothesis, not only because it is a promise we made to the non-nuclear weapons states at the 1995 NPT Review Conference in return for their agreement to extend the NPT indefinitely, but also because the status quo has done nothing to alter North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Or to quote the bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission:

at a time when the United States is considering how to reduce nuclear dangers globally, it is essential that it pursue cooperative, binding measures with others….The Commission does not believe that unilateral nuclear reductions by the United States would have any positive impact on countries like North Korea and Iran. But some other nations may not show the nuclear restraint the United States desires or support nonproliferation efforts if the nuclear weapon states take no further agreed steps to decrease their reliance on nuclear arms. [emphasis mine].

The Wall Street Journal’s Melanie Kirkpatrick traveled to Maclean to interview former Secretary of Defense Dr. James Schlesinger.  The result was, well: For nuclear strategists, Mr. Schlesinger is Yoda, the master of their universe. I know.  …

Stanford’s Philip Taubman has an excellent piece in today’s New York Times on the START follow-on process and the rough waters Obama will likely have to navigate to implement the rest of his ambitious nuclear agenda.  I found this graf to be particularly important:

If the White House does not assert itself, the Nuclear Posture Review could easily spin off in unhelpful directions. The review that was produced when Bill Clinton was president in 1994 offered a rehash of cold war policies. The one that was done when George W. Bush took office in 2001 was more unconventional, but was quickly overshadowed by the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq.[emphasis mine]

Exactly.  As Janne Nolan and Robert Holmes noted in an article last year in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (unfortunately subscriber only):

Leadership is the art of superintending change. Presidents need to demonstrate their commitment to specific, high-priority strategic outcomes, state that these outcomes are nonnegotiable, and be prepared to intervene personally when the process encounters trouble. Tactics for implementation can be left to subordinates who can count on the president’s full backing.

I hope President Obama (and his key civilian appointees for nuclear policy) understand what is at stake here.  The U.S. nuclear weapons establishment has a well-known “status quo bias”.  If the President is unhappy with the direction of the NPR, it will be up to him to insist that it be reoriented in a direction more in keeping with his bold nuclear policy vision.

Will the real Keith Payne please stand up?  In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Payne, a member of the bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, attacked the U.S.-Russia Joint Understanding for the START Follow-on Treaty, claiming that it “has the potential to compromise U.S. security.”

To be fair, Payne does not say he would necessarily oppose a START follow-on agreement within the limits outlined in the Joint Understanding (1,500-1,675 warheads and 500-1,100 delivery vehicles by 2017).  However, he raises issues and concerns about the START follow-on process that fly in the face of the language he agreed to in the Strategic Posture Commission’s final report.  

First, recall what the Commission had to say about arms control with Russia.  The Commission drew a clear dividing line between “tak[ing] a modest first step to ensure that there is a successor to START I when it expires at the end of 2009” and “the challenges of deeper nuclear reductions.”  According to the final report:

A mutual reduction of operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons in some increment should be achievable. This first reduction could be a modest one, but the objective should be to do what can be done in the short term to rejuvenate the process and ensure that strategic arms control survives the end of START I at the end of 2009. Recalling that reductions in nuclear forces should proceed only through bilateral agreements, the United States and Russia should address limits on both launchers and warheads and discuss how to adapt the comprehensive START verification measures to any new commitments. Success in taking this first step would help create the political will to proceed to follow-on steps on the basis of effective verification.

Though Payne signed his name to this language, it seems he now wants to renounce it.  First, Payne argues that “locking in specific reductions for U.S. forces prior to the conclusion of the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review is putting the cart before the horse.”  But the Strategic Posture Commission does not hinge “taking a modest first step” upon a fully completed NPR.  In any event, several Obama administration officials have hinted that the first phase of the NPR has already been completed to inform the START follow-on negotiations.  

Second, Payne claims that Russia plans to draw down its delivery vehicles “with or without a new arms control agreement.”  Consequently, the Obama administration will be forced to move toward the lower bound of the Joint Understanding’s proposed 500-1,100 limit on delivery vehicles “in order to match Russian reductions.” Payne contends that such a reduction “would make the U.S. more vulnerable to destabilizing first-strike dangers.”

This is absurd for numerous reasons.  While the U.S. possesses approximately 1198 START-accountable delivery vehicles, in reality it possesses approximately 800 (Russia possesses approximately 814 and 620 delivery vehicles, respectively).  The U.S. will easily be able to reach the upper bound of the 500-1,100 limit, and assuming the two sides can reach some additional compromises on counting rules, could go even lower without making any significant changes to its current force structure. Furthermore, as Hans Kristensen notes, “It is precisely because Russia is reducing that the United States should also trim its force; anything else will cater to those elements in Russia who want to stop and reverse the reduction.  How could such a future possibly be in the interest of the United States or its allies (and, for that matter, Russia)?”  Finally, drawing down to 500 delivery vehicles would not threaten the survivability of the U.S. deterrent, since Russia is moving down to that level in any event.  Payne does not bother to explain why the U.S. would be more vulnerable with 500 delivery vehicles; he simply asserts that it would be.

Third, Payne complains that the Joint Understanding does not address Russia’s numerical advantage in so-called tactical nuclear weapons.  Once again, however, the Strategic Posture Commission notes that this is a challenge to be addressed in the context of deeper nuclear reductions, not the “modest first step.”

In sum, the Joint Understanding comports comfortably with the recommendations of the Strategic Posture Commission.  Perhaps Keith Payne should be reading more…Keith Payne.

Update (7/9): Hans Kristensen sends the following e-mail: “On Payne’s point about Obama locking in the reductions before completion of the NPR, recall that Bush did the same with 1,700-2,200 before the 2001 NPR that Payne was part of was completed. I didn’t hear any complaints from him back then.”

Yesterday Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Richard Perle published an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal castigating President Obama for pursuing policies that will purportedly lead to the destruction of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.  Kyl and Perle trot out the usual right-wing talking points on nuclear weapons: the U.S. nuclear stockpile and its supporting intellectual and physical infrastructure are atrophying; U.S. allies are losing confidence in the credibility of the U.S. extended deterrent; the CTBT is unverifiable, there is no link between great power nuclear reductions and nonproliferation; the proposed missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic is essential to U.S. security; etc.

Below is my attempt at a point-by-point rebuttal, with my responses in italics.

…

Consider the president’s declaration, in a major speech this spring in Prague, of “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Will such a world be peaceful and secure? It is far from self-evident.

In the nuclear-free world that ended in 1945 there was neither peace nor security. Since then there have indeed been many wars but none has come close to the carnage that occurred regularly before the development of nuclear weapons, and none has pitted nuclear powers against each other.

The claim that nuclear weapons prevent great power war is an oft-heard criticism of the goal of nuclear abolition.  The implication here is that in the absence of nuclear weapons, inter-state politics would come to resemble a Hobbesian state of war.

Setting aside the questionable validity of this argument, supporters of the goal of nuclear abolition do not argue that abolition would be either feasible or desirable right now, given the current realities of international politics.  As George Perkovich and James Acton, co-authors of the Adelphi Paper Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, argue, eliminating nuclear weapons would require

Kyl and Perle have every right to argue that such a world is utopian, but they should at least present the views of those they’re attacking fairly.

My response continues below the jump.

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[I]n his Prague speech, Mr. Obama announced that the U.S. would “immediately and aggressively” pursue ratification of the comprehensive ban on the testing of nuclear weapons. The administration believes, without evidence, that ratification of the test-ban treaty will discourage other countries from developing nuclear weapons.

Which countries does it have in mind? Iran? North Korea? Syria? Countries alarmed by the nuclear ambitions of their enemies? Allies who may one day lose confidence in our nuclear umbrella?

Supporters of the CTBT do not argue that Treaty “will discourage other countries from developing nuclear weapons” [emphasis mine].  Rather, they argue that a permanent test ban would close off the one reliable avenue by which other states could develop new, sophisticated nuclear weapons or increase the lethality of already existing arsenals.  

Furthermore, they argue that the CTBT could raise the cost to North Korea and Iran of continuing their nuclear programs.  As Sam Berger, Sam Nunn, and Bill Perry put it in a recent Op-Ed,

Finally, the claim that “allies may one day lose confidence in our nuclear umbrella” if the U.S. embraces the test-ban treaty is flat out ridiculous.  It would be nice to know which allies Kyl and Perle are talking about, since all of them think the United States should ratify the CTBT.

There are good reasons why the test-ban treaty has not been ratified. The attempt to do so in 1999 failed in the Senate, mostly out of concerns about verification — it simply is not verifiable.

On the contrary, the CTBT is effectively verifiable.  The capabilities of the International Monitoring System have improved a great deal since the Senate rejected the Treaty in 1999, as evidenced by its detection of both of North Korea’s small nuclear tests.  Any cheating that might go undetected is unlikely to be militarily significant.

It also failed because of an understandable reluctance on the part of the U.S. Senate to forgo forever a test program that could in the future be of critical importance for our defense and the defense of our allies.

Robert Gates, who is now Mr. Obama’s own secretary of defense, warned in a speech last October that in the absence of a nuclear modernization program, even the most modest of which Congress has repeatedly declined to fund, “[a]t a certain point, it will become impossible to keep extending the life of our arsenal, especially in light of our testing moratorium.” Suppose future problems in our nuclear arsenal emerge that cannot be solved without testing? Would our predicament discourage nuclear proliferation — or stimulate it?

The United States has no need to resume testing in order to maintain the reliability of its nuclear arsenal.  As the 2002 National Academy of Sciences Report on the CTBT, which included three former lab directors, concluded, “the United States has the technical capabilities to maintain confidence in the safety and reliability of its existing nuclear-weapon stockpile under the CTBT, provided that adequate resources are made available to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) nuclear-weapon complex and are properly focused on this task.”  Thanks to the Stockpile Stewardship Program, a science-based effort to maintain confidence in the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear arsenal absent nuclear testing, United States knows far more about its nuclear weapons today than it did when it was testing.

For the foreseeable future, the U.S. and many of our allies rely on our nuclear deterrent. And as long as the U.S. possesses nuclear weapons, they must be — as Mr. Obama recognized in Prague — “safe, secure and effective.” Yet his proposed 2010 budget fails to take the necessary steps to do that.

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By neglecting — and in some cases even opposing — essential modernization programs, arms-control proponents are actually undermining the prospect for further reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As our nuclear weapons stockpile ages and concern about its reliability increases, we will have to compensate by retaining more nuclear weapons than would otherwise be the case. This reality will necessarily influence future arms-control negotiations, beginning with the upcoming Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty follow-on.

Like the bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, Kyl and Perle paint a misleading picture of the health of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and its supporting infrastructure.  The U.S. nuclear weapons complex remains the most advanced and well-funded on the planet.  While the nuclear weapons laboratories must clearly retain the flexibility to perform the full range of laboratory skills, that does not mean it would be prudent now to put new nuclear weapon designs into the stockpile, which might have their own defects, as Perle and Kyl seem to prefer.

For these negotiations, the Russians are insisting on a false linkage between nuclear weapons and missile defenses. They are demanding that we abandon defenses against North Korean or Iranian missiles as a condition for mutual reductions in American and Russian strategic forces. As the president cuts the budget for missile defense and cedes ground to the Russians on our planned defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, we may end up abandoning a needed defense of the U.S. and our European allies from the looming Iranian threat.

The Obama administration has made it clear that it will deploy the national missile defense system intended for Poland and the Czech Republic only if the threat from Iran persists, the system is proven to work, and the system is cost-effective.  

At the moment, Iran remains years away from the ability to place a nuclear warhead atop a missile, much less a missile capable of hitting Europe or the United States.  Moreover, according to the office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, the senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense on testing of Department of Defense weapon systems,

Given that (1)  the threat for which the system is designed does not yet (and may never) exist and (2) the system does not work, common sense would seem to dictate that it not be deployed at this time (if ever).

There is a fashionable notion that if only we and the Russians reduced our nuclear forces, other nations would reduce their existing arsenals or abandon plans to acquire nuclear weapons altogether. This idea, an article of faith of the “soft power” approach to halting nuclear proliferation, assumes that the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces — or that India, Pakistan or China would respond with reductions of their own.

The “fashionable notion” outlined by Kyl and Perle above exists only in their imagination.  Proponents of deep, bilateral U.S.-Russian reductions do not argue that such reductions would cause North Korea or Iran to abandon their nuclear programs.

As the Strategic Posture Commission notes,

At no point do Kyl or Perle attempt to grapple with this subtler, more refined argument. Instead they happily cite the Commission where it buttresses their ideological predilections, and simply dismiss it on the many occasions where it does not.

This is dangerous, wishful thinking. If we were to approach zero nuclear weapons today, others would almost certainly try even harder to catapult to superpower status by acquiring a bomb or two. A robust American nuclear force is an essential discouragement to nuclear proliferators; a weak or uncertain force just the opposite.

The existing U.S. arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons has not prevented Iran and North Korea from pursuing a nuclear weapons capability.  Moreover, Kyl and Perle do not bother to explain how such an arsenal is relevant to combating the threat posed by nuclear terrorism, two words which are conspicuously absent from their piece.  Nearly every security expert agrees that the threat of nuclear terrorism is the gravest threat to U.S. security.  Yet the U.S. nuclear stockpile, which serves as a deterrent against state use of nuclear weapons, is irrelevant to the threat of terrorists using nuclear weapons. There is no terrorist “homeland” to threaten with an overwhelming response.  Today, more nuclear weapons mean more opportunities for accidents or theft.

George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn have, on this page, endorsed the distant goal — about which we remain skeptical — of a nuclear-free world. But none of them argues for getting there by neglecting our present nuclear deterrent. The Perry-Schlesinger Commission has provided a path for protecting that deterrent. Congress and the president should follow it, without delay.