Today the Senate Republican Policy Committee (RPC) released a policy paper titled “START: Do Time Extension Instead of a Bad Treaty.”    

According to the paper, the Senate is unlikely more likely to ratify a START follow-on treaty unless if it includes at least six conditions and restrictions, including a requirement that the follow-on deal with Russian tactical nuclear weapons, that would essentially make it impossible to complete an agreement by the time START I expires on December 5.  Naturally, these limitations fit quite comfortably with the RPC’s preferred outcome, which is that START should simply be extended more or less indefinitely without any further reductions in the U.S. arsenal.

Where to start (and end, since it’s getting late in the day).  By my count, the paper cites the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States 25 times.  Of course, it omits the one Commission statement that is most relevant:

“The moment appears ripe for a renewal of arms control with Russia, and this bodes well for a continued reduction in the nuclear arsenal. The United States and Russia should pursue a step-by-step approach and take a modest first step to ensure that there is a successor to START I when it expires at the end of 2009.  Beyond a modest incremental reduction in operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons, the arms control process becomes much more complex as new factors are introduced.” [emphasis mine].

As I’ve argued on countless occasions in this space, the Commission makes a clear distinction between a modest first step (as embodied by the Joint Understanding signed in Moscow) and the challenges associated with deeper reductions (such as the asymmetry in U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear weapons).  At no point does the Commission hinge taking a modest first step on a completed NPR (which the RPC begrudgingly concedes has already progressed far enough to account for the limits contained in the Joint Understanding in any event), modernizing the complex, or dealing with tactical nuclear weapons.

Then again, it shouldn’t be surprising that the RPC is purposefully misconstruing the Commission’s findings and recommendations, since two of the Commission’s conservative members, including the vice-chairman, have also conveniently chosen to forget the consensus* they agreed to in the final report (see here and here).  

*Jeffrey’s point about this “consensus” being ephemeral notwithstanding, I still think it should count for something.

In the commotion of European missile defense, UN speeches, Security Council resolutions, and Iranian and Korean developments, it is possible that you missed Nicholas Thompson’s chilling gift to the world on September 21st in Wired: a public unveiling of an alleged Soviet nuclear doomsday system that remains in operation today.

According to Thompson’s sources, the system, named “The Perimeter” but also known as “Dead Hand,” was built to ensure a nuclear retaliatory capability in the case of a successful American first strike.  Even in the direst of circumstances—if the entire command-and-control structure had been eliminated—Dead Hand would bypass all layers of command and put retaliatory authority in the hands of a single man inside of a hidden bunker with a launch button.

The title of the article, “Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine”, may cause more alarm than appropriate; the architecture of the existing system does not entail quite the apocalyptic automaticity as the machine in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.  Various safeguards have been built into the existing system.  Nonetheless, the existence of such a system, if true, is unnerving on the most fundamental and instinctual levels.  It is truly bewildering that hardly anyone knows about it, and Thompson and his sources hope to expose it.  A fully integrated retaliation system like Dead Hand could be capable of turning a single accident into nuclear holocaust.

Here are a few excerpts from the article to tickle your fancy:

When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.

One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase.

Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

In fact, the Soviet military didn’t even inform its own civilian arms negotiators. “I was never told about Perimeter,” says Yuli Kvitsinsky, lead Soviet negotiator at the time the device was created. And the brass still won’t talk about it today.

In his first address to the UN General Assembly, President Obama called for “a new era of engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”  Greater international cooperation is necessary, he argued, to achieve four key pillars: non-prolife…

Many op-eds have been published in the last few days that berate the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the U.S. missile defense system in Europe. Most of the articles omit a basic statistic that is critical to understand.

According to this Missile Defense Agency fact sheet, the three-stage ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system, a variant of which was to be built in Europe, has recorded a testing success rate of 62%. When they occurred, these successes tended to exclude realistic countermeasures (decoys) and to be heavily scripted (the defenders knew beforehand both the timing and location of the target missile).

Of course, since the Pentagon Director for Operational Test & Evaluation concluded that the effectiveness of the two-stage European variant “cannot be assumed” simply because it would have been derived from the three-stage variant in Alaska and California, the testing record of the three-stage variant is largely irrelevant. The European interceptors lacked an authentic testing record, and the technology from which they were to be derived had a problematic testing record. This was no basis for technological confidence.

In contrast…

…the SM-3 system proposed by Obama boasts a 83% success rate. This still leaves much room for improvement – particularly when it comes to combat realism – but certainly is superior to the GMD success rate. If you want to get even more statistical, a quick Fischer’s exact test yields a 2-tailed P-value of 0.2347, roughly meaning that there is only a 23.47% chance that the disparity in the two systems’ testing record has to do with bad luck. Instead, it is reasonable to attribute this disparity to the Aegis/SM-3 system’s technical superiority over GMD.

Max Weber once explained that “The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts – I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.” Unfortunately, this lesson does not seem to have been learned by the syndicate of op-ed writers who have ignored the central logic of technical prudence and depicted the missile defense decision, first and foremost, as a U.S. betrayal of European allies and an inability to stave off Russian pressure.

On a different but also important note, many pundits have criticized the administration’s delivery of the decision. They have faulted Obama for not officially alerting Poland and the Czech Republic far in advance of the announcement. However, Obama’s delivery had little to do with discourtesy and much to do with the modern reality of international diplomacy, politics, and media. Obama could not have told Poland and the Czech Republic earlier because this information would have been immediately leaked and, thus, effectively announced. Given this reality, the announcement had to be made abruptly in a fashion that might seem reckless to some.  

In fairness, announcing the changes on the 70-year anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland was a political oversight that unnecessarily gave administration critics an emotionally-charged talking point.