Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: US Nuclear Weapons Policy

  • Barack Obama’s Historic Victory

    This historic victory by Barack Obama is the first truly global election that has been celebrated by people around the world as if they had been voting participants. The reelection of George W. Bush in 2004 was also a national election with global reverberations, but it only aroused widespread feelings of fear and resentment around the world, and no sense of participation. What we are slowly learning is that the United States is the first global state, and as such, its elections become a global, as well as a national, event. From this perspective it is not surprising that peoples throughout the world follow American presidential campaigns and either cheer or lament their outcome. What may be still unappreciated is that for many societies these American elections seem to generate more interest and enthusiasm than do elections in their own country. Barack Obama’s landslide victory in the United States was without doubt an impressive achievement. It also restored international confidence in the health of the American body politic. It is worth noting that if peoples throughout the world had been enfranchised to vote in the American elections, the outcome would have been far more one-sided in Obama’s favor. Perhaps, someday the realities of political globalization will extend worldwide American voting rights, conferring actual rights as the foundation of an emergent ‘global democracy,’ but such a moment seems far off.

    There are many reasons for most Americans to affirm Obama’s victory. It does represent a remarkable threshold of achievement for African Americans who have long borne the cruel burdens of racism. Beyond this Obama’s signature claim to lead the United States derived initially from his principled opposition to the Iraq War from its onset. His unconditional commitment to end American combat involvement in Iraq was extremely popular with voters, and will be tested in the months ahead as the politics of disengagement and withdrawal unfolds. Obama’s campaign effectively championed the theme of change and hope countering the mood of despair associated with the disillusionment after eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency as recently intensified by the sharp economic downturn. The Obama victory, above all, signaled to the world an American willingness to repudiate Bush militarist and unilateralist approaches to global policy. It also clearly expressed a willingness to address the financial meltdown and its economic fallout with policies helpful to the mass of Americans, and not just to Wall Street. This meant a long overdue reassertion of regulatory authority over markets and banks. There will be broad support among the American people for moving in these reformist directions, but the path will also be blocked at every stage by special interests that benefit from keeping things as they are. The joy of the moment risks becoming the disappointment of the hour as the pain, tensions, and intractability of this economic crisis become clear to the citizenrty. The opportunities for this new president are exciting, and seem attainable given his inspirational qualities of leadership. And yet we must realize that the challenges are daunting, perhaps beyond the capacity of any leader to meet successfully, at least in the short run. Time will tell, but what now prevails is an unprecedented mood of high and happy expectations. This will certainly bring a reformist resolve to Washington, but such a mood is fraught with peril. It can quickly give way to a sense of bitter disappointment, and can even give rise to charges of betrayal.

    The most immediate foreign policy issues concern the war on terror, how to withdraw from Iraq and achieve stability in Afghanistan. Obama will undoubtedly do his best to end the American combat role in Iraq as soon as possible, more or less in accord with his promise of completing the process in 16 months. The success of this effort will depend heavily upon what recently semi-dormant Iraqi insurgent forces do during the initial stages of this withdrawal process, and this is impossible to foresee. Withdrawal is likely to go relatively smoothly if the contending forces in Iraq realize that the alternative to power-sharing accommodations and compromises would be a long and bloody civil war, but such an optimistic outlook may never materialize, and then what. The rapid removal of American troops is quite likely to lead to an immediate escalation of Iraqi violence as anti-government forces are tempted to test the will and capability of the Maliki government in circumstances where it is losing American support. If this latter scenario unfolds, it would exert considerable pressure on Obama to halt further withdrawals, or even reverse course. Under these conditions Obama would likely seek to avoid being charged with responsibility for a costly defeat in Iraq. Republican critics will undoubtedly will allege that such regression in Iraq would have been averted had the Bush/McCain policy of indefinitely prolonging the military engagement continued to guide American policy. As is always the case with foreign intervention in an unresolved struggle for national self-determination, uncertainty pervades any policy choice. Obama’s opposition to the undertaking of the Iraq War has long been vindicated, but whether his advocacy of rapid extrication is feasible under current conditions will remain uncertain during the months ahead. In light of these risks, Obama advisors may be tempted to pursue a more ambiguous policy path in Iraq by appearing to withdraw, but actually redeploying most of the American troops in the region, including the retention of a large military presence in Iraq. If Obama opts for such caution it may temporarily calm some conservative critics in Washington and the media but he will encounter sharp criticism from his legions of young supporters who did so much to elect him. How Obama decides to walk this tightrope between the political mainstream and his grassroots movement will shape the early months of his presidency, especially in foreign affairs.

    Obama is simultaneously being challenged by a deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan that includes the revival of the Taliban, a weak central government in Kabul, and the mounting political difficulties of dealing with hostile cross border forces located in Pakistan. During the presidential campaign Obama pursued a centrist line on the war on terror by advocating an enhanced involvement of American military forces in Afghanistan without ever questioning whether this underlying ‘war’ should be ‘undeclared,’ and terrorism treated as elsewhere in the world, as a matter for law enforcement and intelligence operations, and taking full advantage of inter-governmental cooperation. Both Obama and McCain favored augmenting American troops on the ground in Afghanistan by at least 32,000. Obama contended that such a shift could be achieved without further straining the overstretched military by assigning some of the departing American forces from Iraq to Afghanistan. What is at stake here is Obama’s double view of the two wars, that the Iraq War was a wrong turn, whereas the Afghanistan War was a correct response to 9/11 but was not properly carried to completion primarily due to the diversion of attention and resources to Iraq. Obama wants to correct both mistakes of the Bush presidency, but at the same time he appears to subscribe to the major premise that declaring “a war on terror,” at least on al Qaeda, was the right thing to do, and that Afghanistan is a necessary theater of military engagement, including insisting upon and managing Afghan regime change. Obama has also made some threats about carrying out attacks in Pakistan, even without the consent of Islamabad, if reliable intelligence locates Osama Bin Laden or al Qaeda sancturaries.

    What is most troublesome about according renewed attention to Afghanistan is its seemingly uncritical reliance on counterinsurgency doctrine to promote American interests in a distant foreign country. General David Petraeus has reformed counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in intelligent ways that exhibit a more sensitive appreciation of the need of American military forces to win over the population and be respectful toward the indigenous culture and religion, but it is still counterinsurgency. That is, it remains an intervention in internal political life by foreign military forces, which is inevitably an affront to sovereign rights in a post-colonial era of international relations. In practical terms, this means that a substantial portion of the Afghan people will probably view the American undertaking in their country with suspicion and hostility, and are likely to be supportive of resistance efforts. There is no doubt that the former Taliban regime was oppressive, as was Saddam Hussein’s regime, but it still remains highly questionable whether a sustainable politics of emancipation can be achieved by military means, and the effort to do so is at best extremely costly and destructive, and often lands intervening forces in a quagmire. This is the overriding lesson of the American defeat in Vietnam, which has yet to be learned by the foreign policy establishment. What has been attempted over and over again is to tweak counterinsurgency thinking and practice so as to make it succeed. It will be tragic if the Obama presidency traps itself on the counterinsurgency battlefields of Afghanistan. It would be far more understandable to mount a limited challenge to the al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but quite another to undertake the political restructuring of a foreign state. It should be chastening to reflect upon the fact that the British Empire, and even the Soviet state with its common border, failed in their determined attempts to control the political destiny of Afghanistan. It will be so sad if the promise of the Obama presidency is squandered as a result of a misguided and unwise escalation of American ambitions in Afghanistan.

    The other immediate concern for the Obama presidency will be Iran. Obama was much criticized during the presidential campaign for his announced readiness to meet with leaders of hostile states, including Iran, without preconditions. It remains to be seen whether Obama will risk his currently strong international reputation by arranging an early meeting with President Ahmadinejad, especially devoted to ensuring that Iran’s nuclear program does not end up producing nuclear weapons. Such diplomacy would represent a gamble by both parties. If successful, it will demonstrate the wisdom of Obama’s approach, and could be the start of an encouraging regional approach to peace and security in the Middle East, especially if the Iraq withdrawal goes forward successfully, and even more so, if it comes that Iran helps to keep Iraq stable during the removal of American forces. But if such an initiative falters, as seems far more probable, then it will erode Obama’s capacity to bring about an overall change in American foreign policy, and it could even lead to heightened regional tensions, risking a widening of the war zone.

    One golden opportunity for the Obama presidency is to reopen the question of nuclear disarmament. The atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 frightened world leaders about the future and created a momentary resolve to find ways to ensure that these weapons would never be developed further or used again. This resolve was soon dissipated by the Cold War rivalry, which expressed itself in part by a superpower arms race, as well as by the gradual acquisition of nuclear weaponry by additional countries. Not since the end of World War II has there been such a realization as at present that the future of world order is severely threatened by the existence and spread of these ultimate weapons of mass destruction. Favoring nuclear disarmament in the early 21st century is no longer just a peace movement demand that is not taken seriously in governmental circles. Nuclear disarmament has been recently endorsed by several eminent and conservative American political figures: Henry Kissinger, former Republican Secretary of State George Shultz, former Democratic Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee Sam Nunn. Their reasoning is set forth in two jointly authored articles published in the Wall Street Journal that are premised on realist approach to global security and shaped by a preoccupation with fulfilling American national interests. They argue that the gradual erosion of the Nonproliferation Regime makes the possession and existence of nuclear weapons by the United States far more dangerous than are the risks associated with their elimination by way of negotiated and monitored reductions. Both Obama and McCain expressed general support for a world free from nuclear weapons, but without proposing any specifics. Many observers of the international scene since the Soviet collapse have worried about such weapons falling into the hands of political extremists via the black market or through theft, especially given the ‘loose nukes’ contained in Russia’s poorly guarded arsenal of nuclear weapons. Similar worries have accompanied speculations that the government of nuclear Pakistan might be taken over by political elements with strong links to extremists. There is little doubt that an Obama call for a major conference of nuclear weapons states for the purpose of achieving total nuclear disarmament over a period of one or two decades would generate strong endorsements from most governments and great enthusiasm at the grassroots. Of course, achieving a consensus among the nine nuclear weapons states will not be easy, but the effort to do so if genuinely promoted by the United States, would be worthwhile. It would at the same time help Obama sustain his footing on the moral high ground of world affairs even should the effort become bogged down by disagreements. Putting nuclear disarmament high on the American policy agenda would also provide global civil society with an activist cause with wide transnational appeal.

    There is at present lots of commentary acknowledging the changing geopolitical landscape: the rise of China and India, a resurgent Russia, the collective force of the European Union, and the leftward tilt of Latin America. Clearly the unipolar moment of the 1990s has passed, and it seems likely that the Obama presidency will go out of its way to affirm its recognition of a multipolar world. It will also exhibit a far more active reliance on the mechanisms of international cooperation than has been the case in recent years. The Obama leadership will also hopefully do its best to avoid pressures to revive the Cold War, as were evident in the neoconservative call for the defense of Georgia last August, or in its warning of the start of a new phase of international relations based on great power rivalry. A generally hopeful trend in world affairs, pioneered by Europe, is the rise of regionalism in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, which could produce new forms of cooperation and peacekeeping that might encourage Washington to accept a more modest global presence, which in turn would begin the difficult process of acknowledging that America’s existing overseas commitments had so far outrun its capabilities that it could no longer meet the domestic needs of its own population.

    It is likely that this renewal of multilateralism will express itself in a more constructive approach to the United Nations as well as a determined effort to achieve a shared global strategy on climate change. Here, too, rhetorical promise may not be accompanied by corresponding action. The Obama presidency is likely to give an immediate priority to domestic issues, especially in view of the sharply falling economy that has already caused a credit crisis, housing foreclosures, widespread unemployment, huge fiscal deficits, and a declining national product. As a result, it would be almost currently impossible for any political leader to summon the political will needed to commit sufficient resources to deal effectively longer range global challenges. The overall American situation increasingly requires some serious structural moves, as well as crucial readjustments of policy. At present, there is no indication that either Obama or his advisors are thinking along these lines. There is no way that the United States can live up to the Obama promise, or more modestly, free itself from its current difficulties without at least taking the following fundamental steps: reducing its military expenditures by 50%, which means closing many foreign military bases, reducing drastically its global naval presence, and ending its program of nuclear defense and the militarization of space; it also means going all out for nuclear disarmament and the abandonment of counterinsurgency and preemptive/preventive war doctrines; and it would require an abrupt shift in economic policy from a reliance on capital-oriented neoliberalism to a people-oriented return to Keynesianism. Given the unlikelihood of moving decisively in these directions during this first Obama presidential term, it will be important to lower expectations so as to avoid cynicism and despair. At the same time critical independent voices must continue to call attention to these deeper challenges.

    Richard Falk is Chair of the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Our Nuclear Future

    Our Nuclear Future

    Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently delivered a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in which he addressed the future of nuclear weapons. He noted that some past US presidents that he had worked for during the Cold War – Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush – all expressed publicly their desire to eliminate nuclear weapons. But these presidents, he points out, along with other leading policymakers expressing a similar desire, “have come up against the reality that as long as others have nuclear weapons, we must maintain some level of these weapons ourselves: to deter potential adversaries and to reassure over two dozen allies and partners who rely on our nuclear umbrella for their security – making it unnecessary for them to develop their own.”

    This is the succinct argument he offers for maintaining an arsenal of nuclear weapons. It is based on two pillars: deterrence and assurance. I might note that two pillars provide a highly unstable platform. If we are to succeed in eliminating nuclear weapons globally, Gates’ argument needs to be carefully examined. I will begin with the argument he makes for deterrence. There are currently nine countries with nuclear weapons, but Gates refers to only three of these, plus a non-nuclear weapon state, as being candidates for deterrence. These are Russia, China, North Korea and Iran (which has no nuclear weapons).

    North Korea has very few nuclear weapons and thus it would take relatively few nuclear weapons to deter them. More important, North Korea has been willing to negotiate the elimination of its nuclear program in exchange for development assistance and security guarantees. So, in the case of North Korea, it seems reasonable to assume that they could be deterred with a very small arsenal of nuclear weapons, and there is a high probability that with the proper incentives and security guarantees they would eliminate their nuclear arsenal. If one accepts that the theory of deterrence is valid, the deterrent force would not need to exceed 10 nuclear weapons.

    Iran currently has no nuclear weapons. It has the capacity to enrich uranium, which could lead to a program to create nuclear weapons. Since an Iranian nuclear capacity would be destabilizing and dangerous, this potential could also require a small nuclear deterrent force on the order of 10 nuclear weapons. The current situation with Iran’s uranium enrichment program raises the question of double standards. While the US has turned a blind eye to the fissile material programs of, for example, India and Israel, it has sought to shut down Iran’s uranium enrichment. There is a need for applying a universal standard to programs generating weapons usable fissile materials. All such programs in all states are potentially dangerous and require strict and effective international control.

    The other two nuclear weapons states that Gates refers to are Russia and China. He notes that both countries are pursuing “strategic modernization programs,” but neglects to mention that they have been pushed in this direction by US missile defense programs, which both Russia and China view as giving the US a potential first-strike capability against them. From their perspective, they are strengthening their deterrent capacity in response to a US threat. Both Russia and China have been very vocal in expressing their concerns about the US missile defense program, but the US has waved aside their concerns.

    Gates is careful to point out that “we do not consider Russia or China as adversaries.” Given the opportunity this provides, the US should seek agreement with both countries to move the size of all nuclear arsenals to much lower levels and to take other steps that will reduce the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used by accident or design. Russia has in the past expressed a desire to move to lower levels of nuclear weapons than were agreed to in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), but thus far the US has put a floor at 1,700 to 2,200 deployed strategic weapons with the ability to keep more weapons in reserve. The US should seek immediate negotiations with Russia to move the number far lower, say to 1,000 each (in total) by the end of 2010, and to add verification provisions to the SORT agreement.

    China’s arsenal of nuclear weapons is below 500 at present, and they and India are the only countries to publicly proclaim a No First Use policy, meaning that they will not use nuclear weapons first under any circumstance. Further, China does not keep its nuclear arsenal on high alert status, as do the US and Russia. China currently has only about 20 long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to US territory. The US should seek an agreement with Russia and China in which all three states commit to a policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons. The US and Russia should further agree to remove their nuclear arsenals from high alert status.

    The second pillar of Gates’ argument is assurance to allies and partners that they can feel secure under the US “nuclear umbrella” and do not need to develop their own nuclear arsenals. But if the US led the way in seeking the elimination of nuclear weapons, this would not be an issue. Ronald Reagan argued in relation to the US and Russia, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” The same, it would seem, would hold true for the world. A world without nuclear weapons would be safer for all countries, including our allies and partners. Many of these allies, including Japan, have been active in building consensus in the United Nations for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

    Secretary Gates goes on in his speech to throw in a few more arguments for maintaining the US nuclear arsenal. “Our nuclear arsenal,” he says, “helps deter enemies from using chemical and biological weapons.” Assuming this is correct and that nuclear weapons could be needed for this purpose, the number of weapons would not exceed the 10 or so needed to deter North Korea or Iran. Gates finds our nuclear arsenal to be “vital” for one further reason: “We simply cannot predict the future.” But this argument cuts both ways. If the US continues to rely upon its nuclear arsenal, other countries are likely to pursue nuclear arsenals as well, making it more likely that these weapons will fall into the hands of terrorist organizations and creating an even more dangerous future.

    Secretary Gates acknowledges the errors in security that have occurred with the US nuclear arsenal and argues that these problems are being addressed by new strengthened command structures. He leaves to our imaginations, though, what security problems may be going unattended in the nuclear arsenals of other countries. Gates worries about the “credibility” of our nuclear arsenal, based upon the “safety, security and reliability of our weapons.” He makes an interesting but common inversion in placing greater concern on the safety and security of the weapons than that of the people they are intended to protect. In fact, nuclear weapons cannot provide security to their possessors; they can only be used to threaten or massively destroy an opponent. It also seems unlikely that a potential adversary of the US would believe it could attack the US with impunity because it estimated that the US arsenal was something less than 100 percent reliable.

    In the end, Gates believes the US must rely upon a “credible deterrent,” as opposed to providing leadership to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. “To be blunt,” he says, “there is absolutely no way we can maintain a credible deterrent and reduce the number of weapons in our stockpile without either resorting to testing our stockpile or pursuing a modernization program.” He seeks a modernization program that would include the revitalization of the US nuclear weapons infrastructure and the development of a new nuclear warhead, the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which the Congress has turned down on several occasions. To follow the Gates plan would be to send a message to the rest of the world that the US, although the world’s most powerful state, finds nuclear weapons useful and will rely upon them for the foreseeable future. Rather than contributing to US security, this is a formula for promoting nuclear proliferation, which in the end will be harmful to US and global security.

    Gates summarizes his position in this way: “Try as we might, and hope as we will, the power of nuclear weapons and their strategic impact is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle – at least for a very long time. While we have a long-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons once and for all, given the world in which we live, we have to be realistic about that proposition.” It seems clear that Gates’ position is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In our current world, only the US, due to its enormous military might, can provide the necessary leadership to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. If US policymakers believe it cannot be done, that the “genie cannot be put back in the bottle,” it will not happen. On the other hand, if US policymakers adopted a different approach, one in which the US sought to end its reliance on nuclear weapons and pressed the other nuclear states to come along, the prospect of a world with zero nuclear weapons would become realistic.

    This does not mean unilateral US nuclear disarmament. It means a negotiated agreement for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons. It would not be easy, but the alternative is to continue with the status quo and drift toward nuclear catastrophe. Nuclear weapons do not and cannot protect their possessors. Retaliation is not protection. All countries, including the US, would be more secure in a world without nuclear weapons. We can move cautiously, but we must move determinedly toward that goal. Only the US can lead the way.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a councilor on the World Future Council.
  • President-elect Obama and a World Free of Nuclear Weapons

    President-elect Obama and a World Free of Nuclear Weapons

    The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is a great moment for America and the world – a time of celebration and tears. The American people have chosen hope over fear, unity over division. In doing so, we have repudiated policies of violence, lawlessness and closed-door rule. We have restored hope and made possible the restoration of America’s credibility in the world.

    President-elect Obama has already made many statements about US nuclear policy during his long campaign for the presidency. The one I like best is: “A world without nuclear weapons is profoundly in America’s interest and the world’s interest. It is our responsibility to make the commitment, and to do the hard work to make this vision a reality. That’s what I’ve done as a Senator and a candidate, and that’s what I’ll do as President.”

    He has also said, “I will make the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide a central element of US nuclear policy.” He has also wisely stated that “if we want the world to deemphasize the role of nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia must lead by example.” He has made clear that he does not seek unilateral disarmament, but that America must lead in achieving the global elimination of nuclear weapons.

    Among the specific steps for US leadership that the newly elected President emphasized in his campaign are the following:

    • lead an international effort to deemphasize the role of nuclear weapons around the world;
    • strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty;
    • lock down the loose nuclear weapons that are out there right now;
    • secure all loose nuclear materials within four years;
    • immediately stand down all nuclear forces to be reduced under the Moscow Treaty and urge Russia to do the same;
    • seek Russia’s agreement to extend essential monitoring and verification provisions of the START I [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] before it expires in December 2009;
    • work with Russia to take US and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert;
    • work with other nuclear powers to reduce global nuclear weapons stockpiles dramatically by the end of his presidency;
    • stop the development of new nuclear weapons;
    • seek dramatic reductions in US and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons and material;
    • set a goal to expand the US-Russian ban on intermediate-range missiles so that the agreement is global;
    • build a bipartisan consensus for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty;
    • cut investments in unproven missile defense systems; and
    • not weaponize space.

    President-elect Obama has proven himself a man of vision and integrity. For the first time since Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev met at the Reykjavik, Iceland Summit in 1986 and came close to reaching an agreement on abolishing nuclear weapons, the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons appears to be within the realm of possibility. This will require presidential leadership, and the President-elect will need support and encouragement from the American people and from people throughout the world.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).
  • The US-India Deal: When Geopolitics Meets Principle

    The US-India Deal: When Geopolitics Meets Principle

    When geopolitics comes up against principle in the US Congress, it is generally principle that is forced to give way. In the case of the US-India nuclear deal, originally proposed by President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2005, the deal would involve transferring nuclear technology and material from the US to India. Geopolitically, it would strengthen the relationship between the two countries, but it would do so at the expense of the principle of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

    India is not a party to the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It never joined because its leaders believed that the Non-Proliferation Treaty promoted nuclear apartheid with its two classes of states: nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.” By not signing the treaty, India, like Pakistan and Israel, held open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons. In 1974, India tested its first nuclear device, what it called a “peaceful nuclear device.” In 1998, India conducted multiple tests of nuclear weapons, and was followed almost immediately by a series of Pakistani nuclear tests.

    The United States, unlike India, is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Like all other parties to the treaty, it promised in Article I of the treaty “not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.” India is a “non-nuclear-weapon State” by the treaty’s definition. By providing nuclear materials and technology to India, the US will be assisting India to develop a larger nuclear arsenal than it already has developed. Thus, the US will be in violation of its treaty obligations.

    India has agreed to allow its civilian nuclear reactors to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but not its military reactors. By supplying nuclear material and technology to India, it will allow India to use all of the uranium and plutonium from its military reactors, which are not subject to inspection, to be used for increasing the size of its nuclear weapons arsenal. This will, in turn, promote nuclear arms races with Pakistan and China.

    Earlier this month, the US applied pressure to the 45 member states of the Nuclear Suppliers Group to waive their rules and allow nuclear material and technology transfers to India. Many of the members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group were as eager as the United States at the opportunity for their big corporations to cash in on selling nuclear reactors to India.

    With the Nuclear Suppliers Group having signed off on the deal, it left only the US Congress to reconsider the matter before giving the green light to the deal. The first step in getting the deal through Congress was gaining the approval of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In this Committee, Senator Russ Feingold introduced an amendment to the bill calling on the administration to reach an agreement with the Nuclear Suppliers Group that there will be no transfers of uranium enrichment or plutonium separation technologies to a country that is not party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    Since India is not party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Feingold amendment would have prohibited transfers of these technologies for producing weapons-grade nuclear materials to India. It is an amendment that upholds the principle that transfers of nuclear technology should not assist in the development of nuclear weapons. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in its eagerness to see the US reap perceived geopolitical and financial advantages, threw principle to the wayside and voted 15 to 4 against the amendment. The four principled Senators voting for the amendment were Feingold, along with Barbara Boxer, Robert Casey and Jim Webb.

    Following the defeat of the amendment, the Committee, in its embarrassing rush to line up behind a Bush policy that substantially undermines the current nuclear non-proliferation regime, voted 19 to 2 in favor of the deal. The only two Senators on the Committee to stand on principle and vote against the deal were Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer.

    If the House Foreign Affairs Committee follows its colleagues in the Senate, it is almost assured that the Congress of the United States will vote in favor of this ill-conceived deal, and the prospects of preventing further proliferation of nuclear weapons will have been dealt a near fatal blow. The US will have demonstrated that perceived short-term geopolitical gain, with an unhealthy dose of potential financial profit thrown in, is more than enough to defeat even the most important of security-related principles. The Bush administration will have succeeded in making the Congress complicit in blowing a hole the size of a nuclear explosion through the principle of safeguarding the country and the world against the spread of nuclear weapons.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a councilor of the World Future Council.
  • Congress Has the Last Chance to Say No to the US-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

    Congress Has the Last Chance to Say No to the US-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

    India never joined the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Instead, it developed and tested nuclear weapons. It is a known nuclear proliferator. India is now thought to have an arsenal of some 60 nuclear weapons, and India’s first nuclear test in 1974 led Pakistan to also develop and later test nuclear weapons. India’s 1974 nuclear test also led to the formation of a Nuclear Suppliers Group, a group of 45 countries that agreed to ban nuclear technology transfers that would make nuclear proliferation more likely, particularly to countries such as India and Pakistan that were outside the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    Despite the obvious implications for nuclear proliferation, George W. Bush put forward a plan in 2005 to transfer nuclear technology and materials to India. For this plan, which is best characterized as the US-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal, a special waiver was needed from the Nuclear Suppliers Group, requiring the consent of all members. This deal ran into trouble when Austria, Ireland and New Zealand initially sought to uphold the obligations of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and held out for tighter proliferation controls, at a minimum a commitment by India that it would conduct no further nuclear tests. Although India would not make this commitment – only going so far as to say it would engage in a voluntary moratorium on testing – arm-twisting diplomatic pressure from the US caused these last hold-outs against proliferation to capitulate. The only barrier remaining to this Nuclear Proliferation Deal going through is the US Congress.

    The Bush administration has given three justifications for pursuing this deal with India. First, it will forge a strategic partnership with the world’s largest democracy. Second, it will help India meet its increasing energy demand in an “environmentally friendly” way. Third, it will open a market for the sale of billions of dollars of nuclear technology to India.

    Forging a strategic partnership with India is fine, but why do it on a foundation of nuclear weapons proliferation? Surely, other countries will be looking at this Nuclear Proliferation Deal as a model that will serve their own interests as well. If the US can do it with India, why not China with Pakistan? Or Russia with Iran? Or Pakistan with Syria? The possibilities for nuclear proliferation are endless, and this deal makes them more likely.

    It is also fine for the US to help India to meet its growing energy demand in an environmentally friendly way, but it is absolute hypocrisy to classify nuclear energy “environmentally friendly.” No one knows what to do with the long-lived radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants – not the US, not anyone. And these wastes are truly long-lived. In the case of the highly toxic and leukemia causing by-product of nuclear power production, plutonium 239, the wastes will gradually decline in danger over a period of 240,000 years. Not the best gift to bestow on future generations.

    There are other reasons as well to be skeptical of nuclear power plants. They are capital intensive, subject to accidents and tempting targets for terrorists. They also require large societal subsidies, such as the underwriting of liability insurance. The uranium used in these plants, if highly enriched, not a technologically difficult feat, provides the basic ingredients for nuclear weapons. The plutonium generated in these plants, if reprocessed, also not difficult technologically, provides another fissionable material for nuclear weapons. Why not support India to produce truly environmentally friendly energy sources, such as wind or solar energy?

    The third reason for the US-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal sounds to me like the real one – that it will open a market to sell billions of dollars of nuclear technology to India. There will be a small number of corporations and their chief executives that will profit big-time from this deal, but they will be doing so at a heavy cost to the people of the world. This Nuclear Proliferation Deal has “double standards” written all over it. Can you imagine the US pushing the same deal with Iran, Iraq or North Korea? Of course not! This deal puts a hole the size of a nuclear explosion through the heart of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    Very soon the US-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal will be back before the US Congress for a final vote. If the Congress approves the deal as it stands, it goes through. If Congress votes it down, it doesn’t go through. This deal, initiated and promoted heavily by the Bush administration, will undermine the security of the American people and people everywhere, if Congress allows it to go through.

    The Bush administration was able to pressure the members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, but the American people should not allow Mr. Bush to proceed with this final cynical act to enrich the few at the expense of national and global security. If you care about the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation, it’s time for action. Let your representative in Washington know that you expect a No vote on the US-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • US Missile Defense: The Magic Pudding that Will Never Run Out

    Article originally appeared in the Guardian Comment is Free

    It’s a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.

    The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don’t possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.

    They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile defence, according to the Pentagon, will “protect our homeland … and our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack”; as long as the Russians wait until it’s working before they nuke us. The good news is that, at the present rate of progress, reliable missile defence is only 50 years away. The bad news is that it has been 50 years away for the past six decades.

    The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing. You wouldn’t know it if you read the press releases published by the Pentagon’s missile defence agency: the word “success” features more often than any other noun. It is true that the programme has managed to hit two out of the five missiles fired over the past five years during tests of its main component, the ground-based midcourse missile defence (GMD) system. But, sadly, these tests bear no relation to anything resembling a real nuclear strike.

    All the trials run so far – successful or otherwise – have been rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn’t have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.

    This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle – formerly a senior official at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence – points out, there are endless means by which another state could fool the system. For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system inoperable. You can reduce a missile’s susceptibility to laser penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles, against which the system is useless.

    Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it so cheap that if the US government were serious about making the system work it would bankrupt the country, just as the arms race helped to bring the Soviet Union down. By spending a couple of billion dollars on decoy technologies, Russia would commit the US to trillions of dollars of countermeasures. The cost ratios are such that even Iran could outspend the US.

    The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be $110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence programme to evade the government’s usual accounting standards. It’s called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.

    Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that “the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation”. Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars’ worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.

    So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I’ll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn’t work.

    US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won’t run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.

    To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it – and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets. Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strongarmed into becoming America’s groundbait.

    If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.

  • Learning From Past Disasters, Preventing New Ones

    *This article is the foreword to the book Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental by Dr. Marc Gerstein with Michael Ellsberg.

    I have participated in several major organizational catastrophes. The most well known of them is the Vietnam War. I was aware on my first visit to Vietnam in 1961 that the situation there — a failing neocolonial regime we had installed as a successor to French rule — was a sure loser in which we should not become further involved. Yet a few years later, I found myself participating as a high-level staffer in a policy process that lied both the public and Congress into a war that, unbeknownst to me at the time, experts inside the government accurately predicted would lead to catastrophe.

    The very word catastrophe, almost unknown in the dry language of bureaucracy, was uttered directly to the president. Clark Clifford, longtime and highly trusted adviser to U.S. presidents, told President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965: “If we lose fifty thousand men there, it will be catastrophic in this country. Five years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of men-this is not for us. . . .”

    But it was for us, casualties included, after Johnson launched an open-ended escalation just three days later. In time, Clifford’s estimates were all exceeded: Before our ground war was ended in eight years (not five), the cost in dollars was in hundreds of billions, over five hundred thousand men served in Vietnam in a single year (1968) out of three million altogether, and — uncannily close to his predicted figure — more than fifty-eight thousand soldiers had died. Clifford’s prophecy in his face-to-face session with the president at Camp David — “I can’t see anything but catastrophe for our nation in this area” — could not have been more urgent in tone or, tragically, more prescient.

    And Clifford’s was not a lone voice. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, had used almost the same words with him five months earlier; others, including Johnson’s career-long mentor Senator Richard Russell, had also made the same argument. Yet Johnson went ahead regardless.

    Why? I have pondered and researched that question for forty years. (The documentation in the Pentagon Papers provides no adequate answer.) But one seemingly plausible and still widely believed answer can be ruled out. The escalation in Vietnam was not the result of a universal failure of foresight among the president’s advisers, or to a lack of authoritative, precise, and urgently expressed warnings against his choice of policy.

    The nuclear arms race, in which I was intimately involved between 1958 and 1964 as a RAND Corporation analyst serving the executive branch, is a moral catastrophe on a scale without precedent in human history, even though its full tragic potential has not yet occurred. The arms race involved — under both Democratic and Republican administrations, soon joined by the USSR — the mutual construction of a physical and organizational capability for destruction of most of the world’s population within a matter of hours. That project — building two matched and opposed “doomsday machines” and keeping them on hair-trigger alert — is the most irresponsible policy in human experience, involving as it does a genuine possibility of creating an irreversible catastrophe for humanity and most other living species on a scale that the world has not seen since the dinosaurs perished sixty million years ago. Even if the system were decommissioned totally — and it is not yet remotely close to being dismantled — such a course of action would not cancel out the fact that over the past sixty years, a moral cataclysm has already occurred, with ominous implications for the future of life on earth.

    I have been trying since 1967 — when I realized that the Vietnam War must end — to understand how we got into that war, and why it was so hard to end it. Since 1961, even earlier, I have viewed the nuclear arms race as an ongoing catastrophe that has to be reversed, and a situation that has to be understood. I assumed then, and still believe, that understanding the past and present of these realities is essential to changing them. In my life and work, I have tried to do what Dr. Gerstein’s book is trying to help us do: to understand these processes in a way that will help us avert them in the future.

    A major theme to be gained from this important book is that organizations do not routinely and systematically learn from past errors and disasters — in fact, they rarely ever do. This intentional lack of oversight can partly explain why our predicament in Iraq is so precisely close to the Vietnam experience, both in the way that we got into the war, deceptively and unconstitutionally, and in the way the war is being conducted and prolonged.

    It might not seem surprising that after thirty years, a generation of decision-makers and voters would have come along that knew little about the past experience in Vietnam. What is more dismaying is to realize that much the same processes — the same foolish and disastrous decision-making, the same misleading rationales for aggression — are going on right now with respect to Iran, with little political opposition, just three years after the invasion of Iraq, and while the brutal and tragic consequences of that occupation are still in front of our eyes every day.

    One reason for this folly is that many aspects of disasters in decision-making are known only within the organization, and not even by many insiders at that. The organizations involved tend not to make relevant and detailed studies of past errors, let alone reveal them outside the organization. In fact, the risk that such a study or investigation might leak to the outside is a factor sufficient to keep inquiries from being made in the first place. Making or keeping possibly incriminating documentation earlier, at the time of the decision, or later is similarly sidestepped.

    This deliberate decision within organizations not to try to learn internally what has gone wrong constitutes what I have called, with respect to Vietnam, an anti-learning mechanism. Avoiding improved performance is not the point of the mechanism. But because studying present and past faulty decision-making risks may invite blame and organizational, political, perhaps even legal penalties, those outcomes “outweigh” the benefits of clearly understanding what needs to be changed within the organization.

    The valuable cases studies, analyses, and information in the pages of this book were not provided by the organizations involved. This compendium arose from the accounts of individual whistle-blowers, journalistic investigations, and in some cases congressional action- and from Dr. Gerstein’s own initiative in collecting and analyzing the data. Did any one of the organizations detailed herein conduct a comparable study? Quite possibly not a single one. And even if they did, they certainly didn’t publish the results in a way that would allow other organizations and individuals to learn from their mistakes.

    Societally, then, we don’t have an easy way to learn from organizational mistakes of the past. That’s one reason that disasters are so likely, and why comparable disasters occur again and again, across organizations and even within the same organizations. In the case of Vietnam, Americans did not learn from the French or Japanese occupations before ours. Nor did Republicans under Nixon manage to learn from Democratic missteps before theirs. Specifically, there was no systematic study of the Pentagon Papers, which were available within the Defense Department to the Nixon administration, but no one ever admitted to having read them or even to directing their staff to analyze possible lessons from them. (I personally urged Henry Kissinger, in a discussion at the Western White House in 1970, to do both of these, or at least the latter, but he later claimed he had never read anything of them or about them, though he had a copy available to him.) As far as we know, Secretary of Defense Laird, Henry Kissinger, and others had no interest in the documentary record and analysis of twenty-three years of decision-making in the same geographic area, against precisely the same adversaries. And so they ended up committing many of the mistakes made by those who’d gone before, with the same results.

    This “anti-learning” phenomenon also explains why it is possible to reproduce our experience in Vietnam years later in Iraq, and now, from Iraq to Iran. In sum, there is strong and successful resistance within many organizations to studying or recording past actions leading to catastrophe — because doing so would reveal errors, lies, or even crimes.

    There is no substitute for the kind of comparative study analysis Dr. Gerstein shares on these pages. I hope this book is read widely; if we are to avoid the kinds of disasters and catastrophes described, we first need to understand them. Flirting with Disaster is a pathbreaking, indispensable step toward such a goal.

    Daniel Ellsberg Berkeley, California July 2007

    Daniel Ellsberg is a Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org)

  • Questions for the Candidates

    Article originally appeared in the International Herald Tribune

    There has been unusual interest throughout the world in the U.S. presidential race.

    Skeptics, of whom there are quite a few, say the campaign is just a marathon show that has little to do with real policymaking. Even if there’s a grain of truth in that, in an interdependent world the statements of the contenders for the White House are more than just rhetoric addressed to American voters.

    Major policy problems today cannot be solved without America – and America cannot solve them alone.

    Even the domestic problems of the United States are no longer purely internal. I am referring first of all to the economy. The problem of the huge U.S. budget deficit can be managed, for a time, by continuing to flood the world with “greenbacks,” whose rate is declining along with the value of U.S. securities. But such a system cannot work forever.

    Of course, the average American is not concerned with the complexities of global finance. But as I talk to ordinary Americans, and I visit the United States once or twice a year, I sense their anxiety about the state of the economy. The irony, they have said to me, is that the middle class felt little benefit from economic growth when the official indicators were pointing upward, but once the downturn started, it hit them immediately, and it hit them hard.

    No one can offer a simple fix for America’s economic problems, but it is hard not to see their connection to U.S. foreign policies. Over the past eight years the rapid rise in military spending has been the main factor in increasing the federal budget deficit. The United States spends more money on the military today than at the height of the Cold War.

    Yet no candidate has made that clear. “Defense spending” is a subject that seems to be surrounded by a wall of silence. But that wall will have to fall one day.

    We can expect a serious debate about foreign policy issues, including the role of the United States in the world; America’s claim to global leadership; fighting terrorism; nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and the problems caused by the invasion of Iraq.

    Of course I am not pretending to write the script for the presidential candidates’ debates. But I would add to this list of issues two more: the size of America’s defense budget and the militarization of its foreign policy. I am afraid these two questions will not be asked by the moderators. But sooner or later they will have to be answered.

    The present administration, particularly during George W. Bush’s first presidential term, was bent on trying to solve many foreign policy issues primarily by military means, through threats and pressure. The big question today is whether the presidential nominees will propose a different approach to the world’s most urgent problems.

    I am extremely alarmed by the increasing tendency to militarize policymaking and thinking. The fact is that the military option has again and again led to a dead end.

    One doesn’t have to go very far to find an alternative. Take the recent developments on nonproliferation issues, where the focus has been on two countries – North Korea and Iran.

    After several years of saber-rattling, the United States finally got around to serious talks with the North Koreans, involving South Korea and other neighboring countries. And though it took time to achieve results, the dismantling of the North Korean nuclear program has now begun.

    It’s true that nuclear issues in Iran encompass some unique features and may be more difficult to solve. But clearly threats and delusions of “regime change” are not the way to do it.

    We have to look even deeper for a solution. “Horizontal” proliferation will only get worse unless we solve the “vertical” problem, i.e. the continued existence of huge arsenals of sophisticated nuclear weapons held by major powers, particularly the United States and Russia.

    In recent months there seems to have been a conceptual breakthrough on this issue, with influential Americans calling for revitalizing efforts aimed at the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have now endorsed that goal.

    I have always been in favor of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. On my watch, the Soviet Union and the United States concluded treaties on the elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons – Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) missiles – and on A 50 percent reduction of strategic weapons, which led to the destruction of thousands of nuclear warheads.

    But when we proposed complete nuclear disarmament, our Western partners raised the issue of the Soviet Union’s advantage in conventional forces. So we agreed to negotiate major cuts in non-nuclear weapons, signing a treaty on this issue in Vienna.

    Today, I see a similar and even bigger problem, but the roles have been reversed. Let us imagine that 10 or 15 years down the road the world has abolished nuclear weapons. What would remain? Huge stockpiles of conventional arms, including the newest types, some so devastating as to be comparable to weapons of mass destruction.

    And the lion’s share of those stockpiles would be in the hands of one country, the United States, giving it an overwhelming advantage. Such a state of affairs would block the road to nuclear disarmament.

    Today the United States produces about half of the world’s military hardware and has over 700 military bases, from Europe to the most remote corners of the world. Those are just the officially recognized bases, with more being planned. It is as if the Cold War is still raging, as if the United States is surrounded by enemies who can only be fought with tanks, missiles and bombers. Historically, only empires had such an expansive approach to assuring their security.

    So the candidates, and the next president, will have to decide and state clearly whether America wants to be an empire or a democracy, whether it seeks global dominance or international cooperation. They will have to choose, because this is an either-or proposition: The two things don’t mix, like oil and water.

    Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, is president of the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies in Moscow.

  • Cold War Has Thawed Only Slightly

    Article originally appeared in Columbia Tribune

    At the conclusion of their April 2008 summit, Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin agreed the Cold War was over and that another Cuban missile crisis would be “unthinkable.” Standing nearby were U.S. and Russian military officers, each holding a briefcase from which their respective president could quickly transmit a launch order that, in about three minutes, would cause hundreds of ballistic missiles armed with thousands of nuclear warheads to begin their 30-minute flights toward Russia or the United States.

    Regardless of public expressions of friendship, the United States and Russia continue to operate under policies that assume each could authorize a nuclear attack against the other. The failure to end their Cold War nuclear confrontation causes both nations together to maintain a total of at least 2,600 strategic nuclear warheads on high-alert, launch-ready status, whose primary missions remain the destruction of the opposing side’s nuclear forces, industrial infrastructure and civilian/military leaders.

    Most Americans don’t know these weapons exist. They have no idea a single strategic nuclear warhead, when detonated over a city or industrial area, could ignite an enormous firestorm over a total area of 40 to 65 square miles. The vast nuclear arsenals have effectively been hidden from public view and removed from public knowledge, thus making it easy for smiling U.S. and Russian presidents to proclaim “peace in our time.”

    Another Cuban missile crisis might be “unthinkable,” but the continued U.S.-Russian nuclear confrontation means it certainly isn’t impossible. Presidential assurances to the contrary, the relations between Washington and Moscow are worse than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union. And nuclear weapons remain at the heart of U.S.-Russian political disagreements.

    Eleven months before the April 2008 summit, Putin revealed Russian tests of a new ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads were a response to the planned deployment of a new U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe. Bush said the U.S. system is designed to intercept Iranian missiles aimed at America. Russia argues Iran has no long-range missiles and is not soon likely to have them – and even if it did have them, the sites for the proposed U.S. radar and interceptors are hundreds of miles north of where they should ideally be located.

    The U.S. system, however, would be in an ideal spot to track European-based Russian nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. X-band radar in the Czech Republic and missile interceptors in Poland are to be located between 800 and 1,000 miles from Moscow. If the situation were reversed, it would be the geographical equivalent of putting Russian missiles on the northern edge of Lake Superior. Russia views the proposed U.S. system as a direct threat to its strategic nuclear weapons and warns it will target its missiles at the Czech and Polish sites where the system is to be based.

    Russian arguments are supported by two respected U.S. physicists, George Lewis and Theodore Postol. They say the U.S. missile defense system would be able to track and engage almost every Russian missile launched toward the United States from Russian sites west of the Urals. The physicists said the only obvious reason for choosing Eastern Europe for a missile defense site is to place U.S. interceptor missiles close to Russia, making it possible for the European-based radar and interceptors to be added as a layer against Russia to the already developing U.S. continental missile defense.

    Russia is also deeply threatened by constant efforts to expand NATO and encircle Russia with U.S. military bases. Despite vehement Russian objections, Bush continues to insist the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia be allowed to join NATO. Should this happen, NATO military forces will be positioned on the borders of Russia. If Ukraine joins NATO and accepts the deployment of U.S. anti-missile defenses on its territory, Russia has threatened to target it with nuclear warheads.

    NATO, which began as an anti-Soviet alliance, is locked in a Cold War mentality that regards Russia as the enemy and keeps nuclear weapons as a primary military option. Four hundred eighty U.S. nuclear bombs (a force larger than the entire deployed nuclear arsenals of France, the United Kingdom, China or Israel) are stored at eight European NATO bases. These forward-based U.S. weapons are intended for use, in accordance with NATO nuclear strike plans, against targets in the Middle East or Russia.

    The Cold War will not really end until the United States and Russia stand down their high-alert, launch-ready nuclear arsenals and finally cease their nuclear confrontation. This surely will not happen as long as the United States continues to push for NATO expansion while ignoring Russian concerns about its proposed European missile defense system.

    Steven Starr is an independent writer who has been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies. He recently retired from the medical profession to work as an educator and consultant on nuclear weapons issues.
  • Firings and Hirings: the US Nuclear Arsenal Versus the People

    Firings and Hirings: the US Nuclear Arsenal Versus the People

    Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has announced the firing of two top Air Force officials for failure to adequately secure the nation’s nuclear weapons, citing a report that found a “problem…not effectively addressed for over a decade.” The individuals fired were the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But why stop there?

    The firing of these two men suggests that the problem is the adequate safeguarding of nuclear weapons and materials in the US arsenal. That is a serious problem, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if we could assure the security of all US nuclear weapons, we would not have dealt with the larger problem of assuring the security of US citizens from nuclear weapons. It is not only our own nuclear weapons we must worry about, but those of all other nuclear weapon states as well.

    What most Americans don’t realize is that nuclear weapons do not and cannot protect us. They are not a defensive shield. All we can do with nuclear weapons is threaten their use against a country that would attack us and then hope that our threat is adequately communicated and believed, and that the leadership on the other side behaves rationally. In other words, deterrence (threat of retaliation) is a theory about how people may behave, and not a means of defense. We are staking the future of our country and the world on deterrence working under all circumstances. Whoever came up with this concept should be fired immediately.

    In fact, some of the strongest proponents of deterrence during the Cold War are now calling for US leadership for a nuclear weapons-free world, precisely because they have concerns about the capacity of deterrence to provide for US security. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined with former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn in pressing for a new approach to US nuclear policy. They wrote in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article, “We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.”

    Working to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons will require far more than firing two air force officials. In the current administration, it would require firing the president. He has failed to pursue US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; threatened preemptive use of nuclear weapons; kept US nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status; sought to develop new nuclear weapons; failed to support US ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue missile defenses (or, more accurately, missile offenses); and has blocked proposals by Russia and China to ban the weaponization of space. The one nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia that the president achieved, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), does not go as low in the number of weapons as the Russians proposed, has no provisions for verification, requires no dismantling of weapons taken off deployed status, and ends on December 31, 2012.

    Both major party presidential candidates have said in general terms that they support the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. McCain stated that he shares Ronald Reagan’s dream “to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.” However, he characterizes that dream as “a distant and difficult goal.”

    Barack Obama has stated, “A world without nuclear weapons is profoundly in America’s interest and the world’s interest. It is our responsibility to make the commitment, and to do the hard work to make this vision a reality. That’s what I’ve done as a Senator and a candidate, and that’s what I’ll do as President.”

    Both candidates are short on details of how they intend to move forward. It is the responsibility of the American people to assure that the next president they elect have a solid plan for getting from where we are now to a world free of nuclear weapons and that he be ready to begin the process on his first day in office. It is certain that without determined US leadership a nuclear weapons-free world will remain a distant goal and the security of the American people will continue to be endangered by the threat of nuclear war, by design or accident, and by nuclear terrorism; and further, that our current arsenal of some 10,000 nuclear weapons will provide us with no protection.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The Foundation’s Appeal to the Next President can be signed at www.wagingpeace.org/appeal.