Another day brings another baseless attack on President Obama’s important arms control agenda.  Today, the Heritage Foundation’s Peter Brookes argues in the New York Post that rushing to complete an agreement to replace START I, which is set to expire on December 5, makes no sense in light of Russia’s “record of non-compliance with existing arms-control agreements.”

Brookes’ cites four such instances of alleged non-compliance: 1) Russia’s failure to abide by its Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNI) commitments on tactical nuclear weapons; 2) Russia’s performance of low-yield nuclear tests; 3) Russia’s testing of a MIRV’ed configuration of the SS-27 in contravention of START I’s “new types” rule; and 4) Russia’s support for North Korea and Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.  

I’ll address each of these allegations in the order they’re raised by Brookes.  

1. Tactical Nuclear Weapons  

Citing the final report of the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, Brookes states “that Russia is ‘no longer in compliance with its PNI [Presidential Nuclear Initiatives] commitments’ – leaving Moscow with what some say could be a 10:1 advantage in ‘battlefield’ nukes.”  

Recall that the PNIs were a collection of voluntary commitments made by the U.S. and Russia in the early 1990s to eliminate certain types of tactical, or “battlefield,” nuclear weapons.  For more information, see this excellent Arms Control Association fact sheet.

Public concern about Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons gathered steam in October 2004, when then-Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker accused Russia of not living up to its pledge to reduce its tactical nuclear weapons during a visit to Moscow.  Russia officials retorted that “[t]he Russian side has fulfilled these obligations by dismantling nuclear warheads from ground-based tactical missiles and removing tactical nuclear weapons from surface ships and submarines.” According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, “Russia has practically carried out in full all of the [tactical nuclear-weapon] reduction initiatives that had been put forward….All those weapons, unlike the situation with the United States, are located solely within our national territory.”  The State Department released a statement later that month which noted that “We believe that Russia, for the most part, has been implementing its PNI pledges, but the U.S. will continue to keep this issue under review.”

As the State Department’s clarification demonstrates, allegations that Russia has violated the pledges it made in 1991 and 1992 are just that: allegations.  The fact is that neither Russia nor the United States release information about their non-strategic nuclear forces. (Update 9/1: The PNIs were not legally binding agreements and for the most part neither side was forthcoming about which systems would be eliminated and when they would be eliminated. As a colleague noted to me in an e-mail, “You can’t violate, or even verify compliance, with an agreement if there is no agreement and there are no specific requirements.”) To facilitate transparency in this area, the United States and Russia could agree to report regularly on their strategic and non-strategic stockpiles (both deployed and non-deployed) and the United States could resume reporting on yearly warhead dismantlements at Pantex, which it suspended after 1999.

While Russia’s tactical arsenal is an important issue that should be addressed, there is not sufficient time in 2009 to reach an agreement on further reductions in nonstrategic forces.  Leaving tactical weapons off the table at this time would not endanger U.S. security because (1) the first round of U.S.-Russian reductions will entail only modest cuts in U.S. and Russian deployed strategic forces and (2) Russia’s large non-strategic nuclear stockpile does not increase the threat posed by its existing strategic weapons.  In fact, when you actually break down the types of tactical weapons maintained by the U.S. and Russia, the “10 to 1 advantage” cited by Brookes turns out to be not much of an advantage at all.

2. Nuke Testing

Many opponents of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) allege that Russia is secretly performing low-yield nuclear tests and that it is doing so by taking advantage of the supposed ambiguity in the CTBT’s definition of what constitutes a nuclear explosion.  The available unclassified evidence does not support this conclusion.  

Regarding alleged Russian low-yield testing nearly all of the allegations are almost a decade old. A March 2001 story in The New York Times noted that Lawrence Turnbull, a CIA analyst, and Charles Craft, a Sandia National Laboratory analyst, had been the source of frequent claims that Russia was conducting hydronuclear tests.  At the time Mr. Craft lead a panel of the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, a group that represents the nuclear views of many federal agencies.  The committee pointed to “highly sensitive intelligence sources” as evidence of its claims.  However, as the story noted, Mr. Turnbull and his allies have a history of poor intelligence analysis.  In August 1997 they told the White House that the Russians might have conducted an underground test at Novaya Zemlya. But after seismic experts challenged that assessment, the C.I.A. retracted that finding and said the tremor was actually a nearby undersea earthquake.

Another set of allegations claims that some Russian officials, especially former-First Deputy Russian Atomic Energy Minister Dr. Viktor Mikhaylov, have attacked the U.S. “zero yield” CTBT interpretation and articulated the reasons for a CTBT interpretation allowing low yield testing.  Many of these allegations, which date back to the late 1990s, are collected in a July 2008 article by Mark Schneider in the journal Comparative Strategy.  However, none of these allegations proves that Russia has conducted or intended to conduct such tests, as even Schneider himself is forced to concede.  

Note that my rebuttal of this claim deals exclusively with whether Russia has conducted low-yield tests, and not the equally important question of whether such low-yield testing would matter in any strategically significant way, were Russia actually conducting such tests (hint: the answer is that they wouldn’t be significant!).

Regarding whether Russia believes the CTBT allows low-yield tests, Ambassador Stephen Ledogar, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Holum and General John Shalikashvili, all of whom were involved in negotiating the Treaty, claim that the CTBT negotiating record demonstrates a shared understanding among the P5 that would prohibit low-yield tests.  Moreover, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev stated in late July that “Under the global ban on nuclear tests, we can only use computer-assisted simulations to ensure the reliability of Russia’s nuclear deterrent” (h/t: Jeffrey).  

3. Strategic arms

Brookes is correct in pointing out that Russia has developed a new, three-warhead version of the single warhead SS-27 (known as the RS-24), and that START would prohibit the RS-24 because it does not conform to the Treaty’s definition of a new type of missile.  Yet it’s not clear why this should be an issue, since most experts agree that the START follow-on agreement will allow for the deployment of the RS-24.

The key issue here is that Russia is retiring older delivery vehicles at a much faster pace than it is deploying news weapons, meaning that by 2016 Russia could have as few as 400 delivery vehicles.  Consequently, the U.S. could soon have more ICBMs than Russia’s entire force of delivery vehicles.  As Hans notes, Brookes should be forced to answer how it is in our national security interest to maintain such a large arsenal of delivery vehicles that Russia can’t keep up with and which therefore pushes Russian planning toward a MIRV-heavy posture.

4. Proliferation

Since I’m out of breath, let me just say that most of the allegations leveled in this section are, not surprisingly, based on the views of anonymous “others” and “some analysts” – not hard evidence.

It must be August.  Yes, that’s got to be it.  How else to explain the fact that Travis and I have once again taken the time to rebut another attack on President Obama’s missile defense policies so uncompelling it defies comprehension.

I jumped all over the missile defenses dissuade and work memes.

Missile defenses dissuade?

Berman and May argue that “a half-hearted missile defense effort” will encourage adversaries to pursue ballistic missile programs.  Forget for a moment that the U.S. will continue to spend enormous amounts of money on missile defense under President Obama, as Travis notes below.  Berman and May implicitly undermine this claim a mere two paragraphs after originally stating it.  As they note, “During the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, the U.S. government made major investments in the types of technologies (space-based sensors, interceptors and propulsion) necessary to field a robust defense against foreign ballistic missile arsenals, irrespective of origin.”  

Of course, these enormous investments have done absolutely nothing to prevent North Korea and Iran from continuing to pursue their ballistic missile programs.  What’s more, most analysts agree that Russia and China’s modernization programs are motivated at least in part by concerns about U.S. missile defense programs, particularly those designed to counter long-range threats.  According to the bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, “China may be already increasing the size of its ICBM force in response to its assessment of the U.S. missile defense program.”  

Thus, rather than dissuading adversaries from pursuing ballistic missile programs, missile defenses can encourage adversaries to research and develop ways to get around these defenses, such as by increasing the size of their ballistic missile forces and/or deploying decoys and countermeasures.  

Though they do not explicitly say so, Berman and May imply that missile defenses add additional dissuasive effects beyond those already provided by the specter of U.S. nuclear retaliation.  Such a view disregards both reason and the way rogue states actually think.  The Arms Control Association’s Greg Theilmann captures it best in noting that:

Therefore, it is unlikely that the leaders of countries contemplating nuclear attacks against the United States would be dissuaded by the prospect that some of their missiles might be intercepted – as much as by the near certainty that neither they themselves nor their regimes would survive the retaliation for such an attack. As with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it is thus deterrence rather than missile defense that offers real security against missile attack.

Missile defenses work?

That advocates of missile defense continue to assert that “the capability to make Iranian, North Korean and other foreign missiles useless has already been developed and field-tested” is yet further evidence that for its most die-hard supporters, missile defense is a theology, not a technology.

Clearly the six Republicans on the Strategic Posture Commission were undermining U.S. security in pointing out that missile defenses designed to counter long-range threats have “demonstrated some capability against unsophisticated threats,” but “this…system is now incapable of defending against complex threats.”

Likewise, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, the senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense on testing of Department of Defense weapon systems, must be oblivious to how fool-proof our missile defenses have become, since he recently stated that:

[national missile defense] flight testing to date will not support a high level of confidence in its limited capabilities…additional test data under realistic test conditions is necessary to validate models and simulations and to increase confidence in the ability of these models and simulations to accurately predict system capability.

But wait, I can hear Berman and May yelling in between bites of their freedom fries.  How can you argue on the one hand that national missile defenses actually encourage our adversaries to build more missiles and/or seek new ways to penetrate our missile defenses yet on the other hand state that said defenses don’t work?  If our missile defenses won’t work, why should our adversaries be concerned?

While this rejoinder is not completely without merit, it is not convincing.  For better or for worse, defense officials, whether they are American, Russian, or Chinese, generally think in terms of worst case scenarios.  As Travis put it a little while back:

…it doesn’t matter if an ABM system realistically endangers a country’s nuclear retaliatory capability or not; the mere perception that any portion of a country’s arsenal may be rendered ineffective as a result of ABM emplacement will cause that country to freak out, and the natural policy response will be to augment offensive forces (due to the beauty of the cost-exchange ratio, etc.).

Last week Defense News published an editorial entitled “Build New Nukes,” which, naturally, argued that the U.S. needs to design and build new nuclear weapons in order to maintain its nuclear deterrent.  The editorial (sorry for not posting a link; it’s subscription only) made a number of objectionable claims, including:

-“Yet while other members of the nuclear club continue to field newer weapons, America’s arsenal remains stagnant.”

-“The trouble is, these sophisticated weapons lose reliability and predictability as time passes-a worrisome fact given their enormous destructive power.”

-“And since making nuclear weapons is an exacting science without civil parallel, if you’re not making them you’re losing the skills needed to make them.  The U.S. Navy discovered this a decade ago, when it set out to refurbish the W76 warheads that top its submarines’ Trident ballistic missiles. Very quickly, engineers realized they’d forgotten key skills to make a critical component, skills that took time and money to relearn.”

-“But failing to develop new U.S. weapons may actually hinder counterproliferation aims. If the countries under America’s nuclear umbrella question its reliability, they make seek nuclear arms of their own.”

To it’s credit, the editors ran a letter to the editor in response by yours truly in this week’s edition.  Coupled with Daryl’s excellent piece, “Transform U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy,” the views of the arms control and nonproliferation community are well represented in this week’s Defense News.  Below is the text of my letter:

U.S. Nuke Safety

In the editorial in the Aug. 17 issue, “Build New Nukes,” the Editors argue that the U.S. must design and build new nuclear weapons in order to maintain the reliability and credibility of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  However, the evidence marshaled in support of this contention does not do the heavy lifting the Editors think it does.

First, since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has successfully maintained the reliability and credibility of its existing nuclear arsenal through a variety of programs under the rubric of “stockpile stewardship” and “life extension.”  No other nuclear power believes that the U.S. is allowing its nuclear deterrent to remain stagnant, and for good reason: the U.S. nuclear stockpile of over 5,000 weapons and its supporting infrastructure remain the most sophisticated and modern on the planet.  

Due to stockpile stewardship, we know far more about our nuclear warheads now than we ever have. Thanks to this knowledge, our confidence in the current arsenal is high and likely to increase over time.  

Second, a recent GAO report on the W76 life extension program concluded that while maintaining and refurbishing U.S. nuclear weapons is a difficult task, the delays in this particular program had as much if not more to do with poor planning and mismanagement than with a lack of technical expertise.

Finally, nearly all U.S. allies protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, including Japan, are also advocates for more robust U.S. leadership on nonproliferation and disarmament.  The most important factor in an ally’s confidence in the credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella is its confidence in the strength of its political relationship with the United States.  

If political relations fray, then the credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella will be perceived to be weak, no matter how many new nuclear weapons the United States possesses.

Kingston Reif
Deputy director of nuclear non-proliferation
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Washington

Some interesting developments out of Iran on the nuclear front.  Via the New York Times Michael Slackman:

While much attention has been focused on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to try to pack his cabinet with loyalists, his choice of a well-respected physicist, Ali Akbar Salehi, as a vice president and the head of Iran’s nuclear agency has been greeted in the diplomatic and scientific community as signaling a possibly less dogmatic, more pragmatic nuclear policy.

Two other recent developments have added to that perception. The first, according to diplomats and scientists, is recent indications that Iran may be prepared to be more cooperative with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The second was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to retain the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, and not to move a more conservative ally into that position.

Slackman of course notes that “experts” aren’t quite sure what to make of these moves.  A calculated softening?  Another pledge that Iran will later renounce?  A product of the disarray that still grips the Iranian political system in the wake of the election?  PONI thinks it could be a reaction to the (non?)story surrounding whether the IAEA has hidden information about the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program, and subsequent demands from the U.S., UK, and others that whatever information has been hidden be included in the next IAEA report on Iran.

Rather than venture a guess based on speculation, this Wisconsin native is headed to the Brewers-Nats game.  Go Brewers!