Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear posture review

  • Lurching Toward Catastrophe: The Trump Administration and Nuclear Weapons

    Lurching Toward Catastrophe: The Trump Administration and Nuclear Weapons

    In July 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1, with one abstention, nations from around the world attending a United Nations-sponsored conference in New York City voted to approve a treaty to ban nuclear weapons.  Although this Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received little coverage in the mass media, its passage was a momentous event, capping decades of international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements that, together, have reduced the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals by approximately 80 percent and have limited the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war.  The treaty prohibited all ratifying countries from developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons.

    Curiously, though, despite official support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons by almost two-thirds of the world’s nations, the Trump administration―like its counterparts in other nuclear-armed countries―regarded this historic measure as if it were being signed in a parallel, hostile universe.  As a result, the United States and the eight other nuclear powers boycotted the treaty negotiations, as well as the final vote.  Moreover, after the treaty was approved amid the tears, cheers, and applause of the UN delegates and observers, a joint statement issued by the UN ambassadors of the United States, Britain, and France declared that their countries would never become party to the international agreement.

    One clear indication that the nuclear powers have no intention of dispensing with their nuclear arsenals is the nuclear weapons buildup that all of them are now engaged in, with the U.S. government in the lead.  Although the Trump administration inherited its nuclear weapons “modernization” program from its predecessor, that program―designed to provide new weapons for nuclear warfare, accompanied by upgraded or new facilities for their production―is constantly increasing in scope and cost.  In October 2017, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the cost for the planned “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex over the next three decades had reached a staggering $1.2 trillion.  Thanks to the Trump administration’s plan to upgrade the three legs of the U.S. nuclear triad and build new cruise and ballistic missiles, the estimated cost of the U.S. nuclear buildup rose in February 2018 to $2 trillion.

    In this context, the Trump administration has no interest in pursuing the nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements, discussed or signed, that have characterized the administrations of all Democratic and Republican administrations since the dawn of the nuclear era.  Not only are no such agreements currently being negotiated, but in October 2018 the Trump administration, charging Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, announced a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from it.  Signed in 1987 by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty removed all medium range nuclear missiles from Europe, established a cooperative relationship between the two nations that led to the end of the Cold War, and served subsequently as the cornerstone of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms controls.

    Although some Allied leaders joined Trump in questioning Russian compliance with the treaty, most criticized the U.S. pullout, claiming that treaty problems could be solved through U.S.-Russian negotiations.  Assailing the U.S. action, which portended a nuclear weapons buildup by both nations, a spokesperson for the European Union declared:  “The world doesn’t need a new arms race that would benefit no one and on the contrary would bring even more instability.”  Nevertheless, Trump, in his usual insouciant style, immediately announced that the U.S. government planned to increase its nuclear arsenal until other nations “come to their senses.”

    Of course, as Daniel Ellsberg has noted in his book, The Doomsday Machine, nuclear weapons are meant to be used―either to bully other nations into submission or to wage a nuclear war.  Certainly, that is President Trump’s view of them, as indicated by his startling nuclear threats.  In August 2017, angered by North Korea’s nuclear missile progress and the belligerent statements of its leaders, Trump warned that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States” or “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”  In January 2018, referring to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, Trump boasted provocatively that “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his.”  Fortunately, largely thanks to the skillful diplomatic maneuvers of South Korean President Moon Jae-in―Trump’s threats of nuclear war against North Korea have recently ground to a halt, at least temporarily.

    But they are now being redirected against Iran.  In May 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement with Iran that had been negotiated by the governments of the United States and other major nations.  Designed to ensure that Iran did not develop nuclear weapons, the agreement, as UN inspectors reported, had been strictly complied with by that nation.  Even so, Trump, angered by other actions of the Iranian regime, pulled out of the agreement and, in its place, instituted punitive economic sanctions on Iran, accompanied by calls to overthrow its government.  When, in July, the Iranian president cautioned Trump about pursing policies hostile to his nation, the U.S. president tweeted, in bold capitals:  “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”  Just in case Iranians missed the implications of this extraordinary statement, Trump’s hawkish national security advisor, John Bolton, followed up by declaring:  “President Trump told me that if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid.”

    This obsession of the Trump administration with building nuclear weapons and threatening nuclear war underscores its unwillingness to join other governments in developing a sane nuclear policy.  Indeed, it seems determined to continue lurching toward unparalleled catastrophe.

    [Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://www.lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).]

  • Charm Offensive Takes Center Stage at the NPT

    This article was originally published in Reaching Critical Will’s News In Review, which is distributed to delegates and civil society representatives at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee in Geneva.

    In February, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was widely and, I would say, unfairly criticized by the U.S. media, politicians, and even diplomats for its participation in the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games. By sending high-level, suave officials to the Olympics, the narrative went, the DPRK was engaged in a “charm offensive” to win over the world and make us forget about its serious human rights violations.

    This week at the NPT PrepCom, the United States launched a charm offensive of its own, holding a well-attended side event during Wednesday’s lunchtime session. Friendly faces from the Department of State and Department of Defense told attendees that there is nothing to worry about in the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR); there is continuity with past U.S. nuclear policy, and their actions to modernize their nuclear arsenal and build new types of nuclear weapons are being done benevolently for the security of the world.

    The substance of the side event did not differ much from the content of the written Nuclear Posture Review, but it was presented with a smile and an assurance that everything would be ok – definitely not the prevailing mood of the written document.

    Presenters applauded themselves for modeling transparency, saying that they hope other nuclear-armed states will publish Nuclear Posture Reviews and talk about them at future NPT conferences. It’s true – other nuclear-armed states, both inside and outside of the NPT, have been less transparent than the United States.

    A darker view of the Nuclear Posture Review was presented on Tuesday at a side event organized by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Speakers from a range of NGOs discussed the implications of the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review for the NPT and for humanity.

    Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists criticized the U.S. nuclear weapons complex as a “self-licking ice cream cone.” Many of the modernization programs and proposed new nuclear weapons systems are being undertaken in order to simply maintain nuclear weapons production capacity and know-how at extraordinary financial cost. The real costs, however, lie in the additional decades of nuclear weapons deployment and the human and environmental toll that is inevitable if the weapons are ever used.

    Jackie Cabasso of Western States Legal Foundation predicted the following day’s U.S. charm offensive when she called the Nuclear Posture Review a sales pitch. Ms. Cabasso also believes the NPR was issued as a threat. The threats to use nuclear weapons are explicit throughout the document, but even the issuing of the Executive Summary in Russian, Chinese, and Korean can be viewed as a not-so-veiled threat to nations that the United States currently views as adversaries.

    At the end of Wednesday’s side event, Christopher Ford, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, said, “This is how responsible nuclear weapon states should behave.” Self-congratulation and charm offensives will not hide the only purpose of nuclear weapons: to indiscriminately slaughter millions of human beings.

    There is no such thing as a responsible nuclear weapon state. The only responsible action a nuclear weapon state can take is to tirelessly work to eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide. Not later, not some mythical future date “when the conditions are right.” Right now.

  • Looking Reality in the Eye

    Rick Wayman delivered this talk at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s side event at the United Nations in Geneva on April 24, 2018 entitled “The Trump Nuclear Policy: The Nuclear Posture Review’s Threats to the NPT and Humanity.”

    I have a lot to say about the Nuclear Posture Review and the other statements, documents, and tweets that together comprise U.S. nuclear weapons policy under President Trump. We have a limited amount of time, though, so I’ll focus on three concepts that come through in the U.S. document.

    In the introduction to the NPR, and repeated later in the body of the document – and subsequently repeated in official statements the US has made – the authors write, “We must look reality in the eye and see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

    The glasses they are looking through are very, very dark. Because what they propose over and over in this document is a readiness and a willingness to use nuclear weapons, including to use nuclear weapons first. They unashamedly say that they are ready to resume nuclear testing in response to “geopolitical challenges.”

    I dedicated my life to achieving the abolition of nuclear weapons after hearing two survivors of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima speak when I was 23, just before my two countries of citizenship – the U.S. and UK – invaded Iraq under the false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction.

    Tony de BrumTo this day, some of the people I admire most in the world are hibakusha from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who openly share the unimaginable suffering imposed upon them when nuclear weapons were used on their cities. One of my personal and professional role models was Mr. Tony de Brum, who passed away last August from cancer, a fate that has befallen so many of his fellow Marshall Islanders following 12 years of brutal atmospheric nuclear testing by the U.S. I’ve spoken with nuclear testing survivors from many countries around the world, and their stories are real.

    That is reality. To see the world as it is, we must look into their eyes.

    ***

    In the NPR, the U.S. accuses Russia and China of arms racing. The U.S. does not explicitly admit in the document that it is also a part of this nuclear arms race. But last month, President Trump said in the context of U.S.-Russian relations, “Being in an arms race is not a great thing.” He also identified the U.S.-Russia arms race as “getting out of control.”

    I think he’s right. There is a new nuclear arms race, and it is out of control. Nuclear weapon designers at the United States’ Los Alamos National Laboratory have welcomed what they are calling the “second nuclear age.”

     If we allow it to continue along this path, we will inevitably create new generations of victims. There is, of course, the risk of nuclear weapons being used. But lasting damage to humanity is caused at every level of nuclear weapons production. From uranium mining, to the production of plutonium, to the precarious storage of highly radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years, innocent victims are created by the arms racers.

    When I was little, I used to watch the local news with my parents in the evening. Starting when I was five years old, Fernald was often the lead story. All I knew then was that people were really sick, and it was a scandal. It was only as an adult that I learned that, just a short drive from my family’s home, there was a uranium processing facility called the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center. They made materials for nuclear weapons. They contaminated the drinking water of local residents with uranium, and at one point released 300 pounds of enriched uranium oxide into the environment.

    That was just one site in one country that was part of the Cold War nuclear arms race. Are we really doing this all over again? Will my 8 year-old daughter hear about radioactive contamination on the radio as I’m driving her to school?

    At this rate, I’m afraid the answer might be yes.

    ***

    In the NPR, the authors write, “For decades, the United States led the world in efforts to reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons.” Notice the use of past tense. They didn’t say that the United States “has led,” “is leading,” “will always lead” – they said that it “led” – meaning that that era has come to an end.

    Two months ago, President Trump talked about the brand new nuclear force that the U.S. is creating. He said, “We have to do it because others are doing it. If they stop, we’ll stop. But they’re not stopping. So, if they’re not gonna stop, we’re gonna be so far ahead of everybody else in nuclear like you’ve never seen before. And I hope they stop. And if they do, we’ll stop in two minutes. And frankly, I’d like to get rid of a lot of ’em. And if they want to do that, we’ll go along with them. We won’t lead the way, we’ll go along with them… But we will always be number one in that category, certainly as long as I’m president. We’re going to be far, far in excess of anybody else.”

    There’s a lot to unpack in that quote. But let’s stick with the concept of leadership, and Trump’s idea that the U.S. is not going to be a leader – it is going to be a follower, no matter where it is being led.

    It’s hard to argue with President Obama, who said that “as the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons, the United States has a moral obligation to continue to lead the way in eliminating them.” Yet here we are, unilaterally surrendering our leadership.

    ***

    Speaking of morality, I had the honor of meeting Pope Francis last November at the Vatican, when he stated categorically about nuclear weapons that “the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned.” A bold moral statement, and one that I agree with.

    The Nuclear Posture Review drips with the threat of use of nuclear weapons. It seeks to justify, rationalize, and shift blame for the United States’ continued possession and development of new nuclear weapons.

    There is no excuse. The language in Article VI of the NPT is not perfectly objective, but even the most liberal interpretation of “at an early date” could not conclude that multiple generations is an acceptable timetable. Every state party to the NPT has a legal obligation to negotiate in good faith to stop this madness.

    Many states have begun to fulfill this obligation through their participation in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. For the others, it’s still not too late to change direction.

  • US Nuclear Posturing Has Adversaries Gearing Up, Not Standing Down

    This article was originally published on March 3, 2018, by The Hill.

    In Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’ preface to the 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), he describes its purpose as “to ensure a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent that protects the homeland, assures allies and, above all, deters adversaries.” These are worthy goals, but likely impossible to achieve so long as nuclear weapons exist.

    Of course, it is preferable that nuclear weapons be safe in the sense that they will not detonate accidentally, and that they be secure in the sense that they cannot be stolen by others or triggered by a cyber attack. These are basically physical problems which can be engineered and guarded against, although surely not perfectly.

    Despite the desire to achieve perfection, it is not possible for humans to do so, as demonstrated through the years of the Nuclear Age by many accidents, miscalculations and close calls.

    The biggest problem with a nuclear deterrent force arises from any attempt to determine its effectiveness. How can possessors of nuclear weapons assure that their nuclear weapons are effective in providing a deterrent to another nuclear-armed country? The answer is that they cannot do so in any physical sense.

    The nuclear deterrent force of a country relies instead on creating psychological barriers. If a nuclear deterrent force is effective in protecting a country and its allies, an adversary would refrain from attacking due to fear of retaliation. Since nuclear deterrence operates at the psychological level, one can never be sure it is effective. Or, it may only appear to be effective until it fails and failure could be catastrophic.

    Mattis also refers to a “credible” nuclear deterrent. Presumably, to be effective, a nuclear deterrent force would need to be credible to an adversary, but credibility is also a psychological term. It encompasses not only the size and power of a nuclear arsenal, but a belief in a particular leader’s willingness to actually use the nuclear weapons should deterrence fail.

    It is interesting that in the 2018 NPR (the Trump NPR), as with previous NPRs, there is allowance for the possible failure of nuclear deterrence. This should not be reassuring to anyone. Mattis ties the need to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal to the credibility of the nuclear deterrent force. He also ties credibility to “ensuring that our diplomats continue to speak from a position of strength on matters of war and peace.”

    The 2018 NPR points the finger at Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Russia and China are accused of modernizing their nuclear arsenals, making it necessary for the U.S. to do the same. It points out that Russia, in addition to its seizure of Crimea, has military strategies reliant on nuclear escalation. It talks about China “expanding its already considerable forces,” but fails to mention that China has a policy of minimum deterrence and has made a pledge of No First Use of nuclear weapons.

    Nor does the 2018 NPR mention that both Russia and China have reacted to the U.S. placing missile defense installations strategically near their borders, or that this has only been possible due to the 2002 U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which severely limited ABM deployments.

    Despite the promising interactions between North and South Korean athletes at the 2018 Winter Olympics, Trump has imposed tough sanctions on North Korea and upped his threats toward the country. Personalizing his message, Trump menacingly stated, “If the sanctions don’t work, we’ll have to go to Phase 2. Phase 2 may be a very rough thing. May be very, very unfortunate for the world.” This is the dangerous and threatening rhetoric of a madman.

    Trump has also failed to certify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal, leaving open the possibility of killing the deal and increasing the odds of yet another war and Iran’s return to its previous nuclear program.

    Mattis concludes his preface to the Trump NPR by acknowledging the vital role played by U.S. servicemen and civilians “in maintaining a safe, secure, and ready nuclear force.” The fact that the U.S. nuclear deterrent force is “ready” is not necessarily a blessing and should be of little comfort to Americans or anyone else. We are all part of “the world” that Trump is threatening to punish if North Korea does not submit to his will. He should be impeached now, before he does something “very, very unfortunate for the world.”

    The 2018 NPR calls for new and smaller nuclear weapons, those that would make it easier to cross the barrier into nuclear war. The NPR also chooses to keep all three legs of the nuclear triad: intercontinental ballistic missiles, bomber aircraft and submarine launched ballistic missiles.

    There can be little doubt that the U.S. nuclear posture will spur other nuclear-armed countries to do the same, thus assuring new arms races and increased nuclear dangers ahead. One has to wonder if the expensive and provocative technological modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and other nuclear policies set forth in the 2018 NPR will be what takes us from the Nuclear Age back to the dark ages.

  • Press Release: 2018 Nuclear Posture Review Released

    NUCLEAR AGE PEACE FOUNDATION

    For Immediate Release

    Contact:
    Rick Wayman
    (805) 696-5159; rwayman@napf.org

    Sandy Jones
    (805) 965-3443; sjones@napf.org

     

    2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review Released

    Trump administration plan calls for smaller nuclear weapons, making nuclear war far more likely.

     

    February 2, 2018 –The 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), released today, represents a reckless realignment of an already dangerous U.S. nuclear policy.

    The review specifically calls for the development of new, low-yield nuclear weapons that have lower explosive force. Many experts warn that such smaller weapons would blur the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, representing a significant and dangerous increase in the likelihood of their use.

    Rick Wayman, Director of Programs at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, stated, “Once nuclear weapons – of any size – are introduced into an armed conflict, no one can guarantee that the cycle of escalation would end. The terrifying reality is that nuclear weapons can end human civilization as we know it. Every person on the planet should be outraged that the Trump administration threatens their future in this way.”

    In another important policy shift, the Trump Nuclear Posture Review would permit the U.S. to use nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of non-nuclear attacks on the United States, including cyber attacks and attacks on American infrastructure. The review seeks to deter nuclear war by making it easier to start nuclear war.

    Last year, the price tag for a 30-year makeover of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was estimated at $1.2 trillion. Analysts say the expanded plan put forth in the Trump NPR review would push the cost vastly higher.

    Just last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight. This is thirty seconds closer to the metaphorical “point of annihilation” and is the closest to midnight the clock has been since the end of the Cold War. Clearly The Trump Doctrine is equivalent to winding the Doomsday Clock in the wrong direction.

    The review does not contain a single reference to Article VI of the U.N. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which obligates the U.S. and the other nuclear-armed nations signatories to the treaty to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament. This posture review signals such a radical and dangerous shift in U.S. nuclear policy direction NATO states will be forced to re-evaluate their positions to not automatically accept and support the U.S. in this changed nuclear policy.

    World leaders now face a clear choice: support the Trump Doctrine and lock the world into a likely nuclear war, or join the rational world in moving towards the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The world’s international security framework must not rely on nuclear weapons.

    David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation said, “The prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons is the only rational choice. World leaders must now take the right step and sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that opened for signatures at the United Nations on September 20, 2017. By doing so, they would lead the world away from almost certain annihilation and toward the worthy goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and creating a safer and more secure world for all of humanity.”

    #                             #                             #

    If you would like to interview David Krieger or Rick Wayman, please call (805) 696-5159.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders. Founded in 1982, the Foundation is comprised of individuals and organizations worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with consultative status to the United Nations. For more information, visit www.wagingpeace.org.

     

  • H-Bomb Physicist, Richard Garwin, Predicts ‘Probable’ Destruction of a City by Nuclear Weapon

    Mushroom cloud from Ivy Mike testFor supporters of nuclear weapons abolition, there is irony that one of the darkest days in human history brought the brightest flash of light the Earth had ever seen. On Nov. 1, 1952, a blinding explosion and cloud ignited the South Pacific skies as America tested “Mike,” the first hydrogen-fusion device and the prototype for subsequent H-bombs. Mike’s detonation, equal to about 10.4 million tons of TNT, and more than 700 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, obliterated the mile-wide island of Elugelab, part of the Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The nuclear age suddenly became even more potentially cataclysmic.


    One of the few physicists alive today who was instrumental in creating Mike, Dr. Richard Garwin, was only 23 in May 1951 when he traveled from his research job at the University of Chicago to do a summer stint at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. A protégé of Enrico Fermi, Garwin eagerly began to puzzle out a problem that had eluded older, more seasoned researchers at Los Alamos: taking the theoretical formula for thermonuclear fusion and sketching out a practical blueprint for a reliable working device.


    By July, Garwin showed his diagrams to colleague Edward Teller, the renowned World War II physicist and longtime proponent of a fusion-powered “Super” bomb that would dwarf mere A-bombs. The younger scientist had drafted a brief, simple memo on how an H-bomb could be made real. Other physicists analyzed Garwin’s design to try to detect key weaknesses. They found none.


    Richard GarwinAfter the test of Mike, over the course of five decades as a professor and government consultant, Garwin built a world reputation as an expert on nuclear weaponry. Never easily categorized as a hawk or dove, he advised a long succession of Republican and Democratic administrations on technical issues. He ultimately became more outspoken about the need for arms control. Perhaps more than any other leading American scientist, he’s also consistently spoken out against U.S. plans for missile defense programs that ostensibly would shoot down nuclear-armed missiles prior to impact. Such antimissile plans, Garwin has insisted for decades, are either wildly expensive, or can easily be defeated by fairly unsophisticated enemy technology, or both.


    An IBM fellow emeritus, Garwin was a recipient of the 1996 Enrico Fermi Award given by the U.S. Department of Energy (with an accompanying $100,000 honorarium), and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush in 2003. A few months later, however, Garwin signed a letter with many other scientists accusing the Bush Administration of “systematically” eliminating scientific advisory committees and tinkering with scientific studies that conflicted with the Administration’s views.


    At 84, he still writes widely about weapons and arms control, and though retired from academia he continues to visit his lab at IBM in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.


    Garwin spoke with NAPF, on the 60th anniversary of the historic explosion of Mike, about present nuclear threats facing the world, ballistic missile defense, and his hopes for further arms reductions. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.


    Kazel: Dr. Garwin, some analysts are saying talks between the U.S. and China on nuclear relations haven’t proceeded further because American military experts don’t take China’s No-First-Use (nuclear weapons) policy seriously – they don’t think it’s evidence that the Chinese would never use its weapons first in any circumstance. What do you think about the reliability of their No-First-Use policy?


    Garwin: Well, I’ve been talking with Russians about nuclear weapons and No-First-Use since the 1960s, and with the Chinese since 1974. Russia used to have a No-First-Use policy. That was when they had enormous conventional superiority in Europe. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the elimination of the Soviet Union, Russia rescinded its No-First-Use policy. So they have an explicit policy that they would use nuclear weapons to respond to a conventional attack, if necessary.


    We talked with the Soviet Union in bilateral discussions in great detail for many years beginning in 1981, with a lot of people in the nuclear weapons business on both sides. We were never persuaded by the Soviets’ No-First-Use statement. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union we know more about that, and we don’t think the Russians were ever really serious about No-First-Use, because they didn’t put into place a posture that was consistent with No-First-Use…


    We don’t challenge [China’s stated policy], but the fact that their weapons for the most part don’t have their warheads mated to the weapons doesn’t mean they don’t have a first-use policy, that they wouldn’t have a first-use capability.


    I’ve always been against a No-First-Use statement by the United States. But I’ve been in favor of a No-First-Use posture [e.g., actual measures to make first use more difficult, such as missile de-alerting].


    We do have the April 2010 United States Nuclear Posture Review from the Defense Department, and there [former Secretary Robert] Gates said the United States is not prepared at the present time to adopt a universal policy that deterring nuclear attack is the sole purpose of nuclear weapons. But it will work to establish conditions under which such a policy could be safely adopted. There are some circumstances, he says, where you might have a conventional attack or biological or chemical weapon [attack] on the United States or our allies or partners, to which the United States might feel forced to respond with nuclear weapons.


    He said the United States is prepared to strengthen its longstanding negative-security assurance by declaring that the United States will not use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states that are party to the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] and are in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations. Now that’s really a very strong statement. That says that if Iran gives up nuclear weapons and attacks the United States with chemical or biological weapons, we won’t use nuclear weapons against them.


    Kazel: What would be more terrible, Iran getting a nuclear weapon or us attacking them?


    Garwin: Hard to see which would be worse, from the point of view of the international scene.


    Iran, if they have a nuclear weapon, doesn’t have to deliver it on ICBMs. It could be delivered by shrimp boat. Or on cruise missiles. Or from ships that come near our shores. I made this point in the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission study on the threat of missile attack on the United States…As soon as someone already has a nuclear weapon, they already have cruise missiles that are capable of carrying the nuclear weapon with a range of 100 or 200 kilometers, and they could strike any coastal city.


    Kazel: Does that constrain our policy even more, and force us to destroy their nuclear facilities?


    Garwin: We’re not going to destroy all of Iran. You’re not going to go in and have the government [replaced]. So, as the Israelis and other people say, it’ll delay them for a year, or whatever, but it will strengthen their resolve to have nuclear weapons. So the right thing is to have a big effort to show Iran that the sanctions would be removed if they stopped work that could be considered as supporting the acquisition of a nuclear weapon. That’s what has to be done. It would be a tragedy if they [Iran] didn’t do that.


    Kazel: So it sounds like you’re saying you think a diplomatic solution is still possible?


    Garwin: Yes, but you have to realize the sanctions have to be removed when the other side caves in. After the sinking of the Soviet Union…I was amazed…a lot of people were promoting the expansion of NATO. I said, I think this is a mistake. I thought we ought to have an expansion of the Partnership for Peace, which included Russia. [Many people felt] the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War and they deserved what they were getting: poverty. You know, when you win, you want to have a Marshall Plan. These are people, after all. You want to get them on your side. To keep [sanctions] on them anyway, because they’re “nasty people,” is (a) counterproductive and (b) immoral.


    Kazel: What do you think the effect has been on China of current U.S. efforts to develop ballistic missile defense systems? You said several years ago that if we develop a BMD system, China would probably greatly increase the use of its mobile ICBMs and countermeasures, so the net effect of a BMD system would be no benefit. Do we already see this happening as a response to our BMD initiatives?


    Garwin: The Chinese have been really very measured in their strategic weapon development and deployment. They…only have maybe 240 warheads…Of those maybe 180 are deployed, and only about 30 would be capable of reaching the United States.


    Sure, the Chinese will employ countermeasures. They will defeat any of the systems that we are [now] building. You know the Chinese pay attention to what people say over here. [Former CIA Chief] Jim Woolsey and I were testifying on the same panel. Joe Biden in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee asked Woolsey if he would endorse a system that is 100% effective against nations such as Iran and North Korea but didn’t have any effectiveness against China. Woolsey said no, he would not. Of course the Chinese read this, and they see that Americans have that as a goal. You can be sure that they’re going to develop countermeasures to the systems.


    Kazel: You’ve said that the Chinese are afraid they won’t have a second-strike capability, even though you also say our BMD system wouldn’t work. The Chinese are unsure – they believe that our missile defenses might work.


    Garwin: That’s right.


    Kazel: In 2002 during George W. Bush’s first term, you did an interview with PBS in which you went so far as to say “the main purpose of the missile defense program is initially to counter China and to get a start on countering the missiles of Russia.” You said the systems, in being presented to the public, were being  “camouflaged” as solely for use against Iran and North Korea. Do you think that’s still the case?


    Garwin: Yes, I think many people in the “defense intellectual” community or in the Congress want to have the capability, as much as possible, to protect the United States against nuclear weapons. But they are wrongheaded in thinking that nuclear weapons are only delivered by long-range ballistic missiles, when in fact they could be delivered by short-range ballistic missiles against coastal cities, or cruise missiles, or even a few smuggled in.


    Kazel: What parallels do you see between our efforts to try to head off a potential nuclear attack by the rogue states using limited ABM systems, compared with U.S. plans in 1968, which you criticized in Scientific American at the time? Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was proposing a rather limited ABM system against the Chinese.


    Garwin: That was just an excuse by McNamara. He was really proposing a system against the Russians. He realized he couldn’t devise a system that would really work to protect U.S. populations against a concerted Russian attack. So something that had a chance of working was against the Chinese….McNamara made this election-year announcement [in 1967], in San Francisco. Ninety-five percent of the speech was, we shouldn’t build a missile defense and here’s why — it won’t work. And the other 5% was, we’re going to go ahead and do it anyhow.


    Kazel: I’ve read your writings from over the years. You’ve evolved into an arms control advocate and supported cutting the number of nuclear warheads on the U.S. and Russian sides to less than 1,000 each. You’ve supported de-alerting. But you haven’t spoken out in favor of more sweeping goals advocated by nuclear abolition groups – for example, the phased, scheduled reduction and abolition of nuclear weapons or a Nuclear Weapons Convention where all nuclear powers come together to reach an agreement. Do you see a limit to the goals you want to support?


    Garwin: Nobody has shown how we [can] have a stable world with states still in conflict and no nuclear weapons. In the United States there are two main efforts, Global Zero with Bruce Blair and his colleagues, including General [James] Cartwright, and the other is the “Gang of Four” – [former Secretary of State] George Shultz, [former Georgia Senator] Sam Nunn, [former Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger and [former Secretary of Defense] William Perry. You’d have to add [physicist and arms expert] Sid Drell as well. They’re persuaded that massive reductions in nuclear weapons and more cooperative effort to get rid of them will pay off, even if not in the [short-term] elimination of nuclear weapons…


    Nuclear weapons…can’t be disinvented. I think the nuclear threat can be eliminated or reduced more effectively by going to a very small number of nuclear weapons, by following the [2010] Nuclear Posture Review, and reducing the saliency of nuclear weapons – the importance of nuclear weapons.


    President Obama has said he’s in favor of the elimination of nuclear weapons but it [might not happen] in his lifetime…That’s what the Gang of Four really says, that they can’t see the top of the mountain – which is the elimination of nuclear weapons – from where they are. But as they get closer to that goal, they’ll have a better view. And so will I, except most of the Gang of Four and I are pretty old.


    Kazel: In 1986, in an interview about your life with the American Institute of Physics, you said that at the end of World War II many physicists started devoting their time to antinuclear projects such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. At the time you didn’t have much sympathy for what you then viewed as “disarmer-type people.” But you said you developed the respect for them that they deserved, later on. What caused the change in how you see abolition supporters?


    Garwin: It was education. I really didn’t know them very well. I hadn’t listened to their arguments. When I got to know them, for example Joseph Rotblat of the Pugwash Movement, and others, I saw that some of these people were extremely capable and thoughtful. They had things to say. I was on the governing board of Pugwash for a short time. I worked in Pugwash workshops on nuclear weapons in Europe. I worked closely with the Soviet and eventually Russian people there, and in 1988 came up with the proposal to have 1,000 nuclear weapons on each side. That was really a big change from the 45,000 nuclear weapons the Soviets had about that time and the 35,000 nuclear weapons that the United States had deployed at its peak in 1967.


    If a few nuclear weapons are good for world peace and security, that doesn’t mean that 10,000 of them are better…I’m convinced there is no need for these large numbers of nuclear weapons and that the world would be a different place if we had only a relatively few – and eventually can think of some way in which we get rid of national ownership [of nuclear weapons]. I do see that the national ownership of nuclear weapons is a substantial barrier to getting to extremely low levels.


    Kazel: Has the world become safer over your lifetime?


    Garwin: The likelihood of nuclear war has receded a lot, but I think the likelihood of improvised nuclear explosives going off in a city someplace is considerably higher. I’ve estimated that [danger] at 50% per decade, and probably I’ve done that for 20 years. We’ve worked very hard to keep this from happening. The Obama Administration has a policy, ratified at the April 2010 Nuclear Security Summit [in Washington], and in Seoul in March, to protect weapons-usable materials throughout the world within four years. That’s highly enriched uranium and plutonium. I don’t think we’ll make that four-year goal.


    Even a Hiroshima-type improvised nuclear weapon detonated at ground level in a city would kill hundreds of thousands of people. There would be a large number of people who would die from radioactive fallout within days who would otherwise be untouched by the blast and the fire.


    Kazel: It sounds like you’re almost resigned to the inevitability that someday this will happen to a city.


    Garwin: Yes, I think it’s quite probable.


    Kazel: A few years ago, you wrote that America’s nuclear development program was making us look bad in the eyes of non-nuclear nations and that we needed to show more “morality and consistency” to be an example to non-nuclear states. How can the U.S. show more morality and consistency?


    Garwin: By greatly reducing the cost of our nuclear-weapons activity and reducing the importance of nuclear weapons in our policy…and to take seriously the reduction of nuclear weaponry in the world, as well as the other parts of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.


    We need to put our nuclear reactors and enrichment plants under IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards – even though we have so much military-useful material, nobody in his right mind would make any more. What we ought to do is work hard on the technical means to make that inspection less expensive and less burdensome.


    I think New Start, ratified [by the U.S.] in December 2010, was a good thing to do. I think working with the Russians on ballistic missile defense would be a good thing to do, to try to dispel the idea that we are building missile defense against Russia.


    The Russians certainly are threatened by Jihadist groups and others. If they, too, are worried about missile attack then we ought to join with them with joint missile defense systems, work on the technology together, have some common basing and common control – but with limited goals, and not with the expectation that we will be able to defeat 100% of these threats.


    Although history has assigned the nickname “father of the H-bomb” to Teller, some nuclear experts have said Garwin may be more deserving of the title. In fact, when recounting his memories of Los Alamos years later, Teller stressed that Garwin had achieved a functional design when others couldn’t.


    Looking back with knowledge of the nuclear age, would Garwin change his actions of 1951? If he could warn his younger self about the consequences of his groundbreaking blueprint in an effort to deter him, would he? Garwin says no. He has no regrets. He says the eventual invention of an H-bomb, once scientists had the theory worked out, was inevitable: “As for the weapons themselves, they would have happened, perhaps a year or more later without my contributions.”


    Moreover, if he hadn’t been part of the inner circle that charted the course to Mike, Garwin says he would have had no key role in arms control debates for the rest of the century and beyond – no opportunity to help try to seal the thermonuclear Pandora’s box after the U.S. had opened it.


    “Scientists were of the utmost importance in achieving the various arms control agreements, including the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the role of the President’s Science Advisory Committee under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was particularly important,” Garwin says. “Not only did scientists from the weapons programs…help to inform the public, but PSAC helped to guide the government to make decisions that were far from unanimous or obvious.”

  • New START and the Lingering Nuclear Cold War

    Bennett Ramberg


    This article was originally published on The Huffington Post.


    As the Senate attempts to wrap its lame duck session with the New START finale, lost in the back and forth over ratification lies one question that few senators appear willing to ask: Why, now twenty years after the Cold War, do Moscow and Washington find it acceptable to retain thousands of warheads pointed at the other with or without the treaty? Recent official strategy documents by both countries fail to address the matter convincingly leaving each country dedicated to continuing the mutual nuclear hostage relationship that ought to have been put to bed long ago.


    Today’s Russian-American arsenals remain remnants of a bygone era. During the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons became both the currency of power and the acute source of preemption anxiety born out of the surprise attack scars the two countries suffered in World War II. The result propelled the exponential growth of weapons to prevent a nuclear Pearl Harbor.


    At its height, the United States stocked 31,000 weapons, the Soviet Union over 40,000 by some estimates. Largely reflecting the Cold War’s demise, but also the legacy of earlier arms limitation treaties, Moscow and Washington have come a long way in curbing inventories. Today the United States deploys some 2000 strategic warheads and Russia 2500. Still, under New START, millions of people will remain in the cross hairs of 1550 deployed warheads.


    In February 2010, Moscow unveiled its rationale. Notwithstanding deterrent weight it now gives to a new generation of precision guided conventional weapons, the Kremlin’s continues to see the nuclear arsenal as its ultimate security blanket: “Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a use of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction against her and (or) her allies, and in a case of an aggression against her with conventional weapons that would put in danger the very existence of the state.”


    In its April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, the Obama administration took a more nuanced approach. It eliminated nuclear targeting of non nuclear weapons states that complied with NPT vows. It added, only in “a narrow range of contingencies” would it use nuclear weapons to deal with chemical, biological and conventional attack. But all other circumstances, including targeting of Russia with the bulk of the arsenal, nuclear war plans remain in tact. The presumption: the Bomb provides “stability.” “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States will maintain secure and effective nuclear forces” to deter, reassure allies and promote stability globally and in key regions.


    Despite the president’s pledge to seek nuclear abolition, the Review registered “very demanding” “conditions” that make more dramatic nuclear reductions practically impossible: resolution of regional disputes that motivates nuclear possession, greater nuclear transparency, better verification to detect nonproliferation violators and credible enforcement mechanisms to deter cheating. The Review concluded, “Clearly, such conditions do not exist today. But we can — and must — work actively to create those conditions.”


    New START marks a step to meet the conditions in the Russian-American sphere, but ultimately a modest one. Eighteen on site inspections, data exchanges, a consultative committee to iron out  disputes serve verification goals. But the Obama administration’s  commitment to an $85 billion ten year refurbishment of the nuclear weapons complex signals little reduction in policies that continue the nuclear hostage relationship.


    Indeed the new nuclear doctrines, budgets to boost the weapons  enterprise and congressional skepticism about New START serve as reminders of President Obama’s lament in his 2009 call for a world without nuclear weapons — “This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime.” The difficult New START debate punctuates the deeper underlying point: the nuclear Cold War has never gone away. The fact should give comfort to no one.

  • Can We Live With the Bomb?

    This article was originally published on the History News Network.

    For some time now, it has been clear that nuclear weapons threaten the existence not only of humanity, but of all life on Earth.

    Thus, Barack Obama’s pledge to work for a nuclear weapons-free world—made during his 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently in public statements—has resonated nicely with supporters of nuclear disarmament and with the general public.

    But recent developments have called that commitment into question.  The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review does not indicate any dramatic departures in the use of nuclear weapons, while its nuclear weapons budget request for the next fiscal year represents a 14 percent increase over this year’s counterpart.  The most alarming sign that the administration might be preparing for a nuclear weapons-filled future is its proposal to spend $180 billion over the next ten years to upgrade the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex.

    From the standpoint of nuclear critics, the best interpretation of such measures—and one that might be accurate—is that they are designed to win support among hawkish Republican senators for the New START Treaty, which will reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.  After all, the political argument goes, if Obama is to secure the sixty-seven Senate votes necessary to ratify the treaty, he needs to pick up some Republican support.  Of course, these pro-nuclear measures might reflect a quite different scenario, one in which Obama is abandoning yet another political promise.

    In this context, we might ask:  would abandoning the promise of nuclear abolition be a bad idea?

    There are at least five good reasons why it would be:

    1. 1. If nuclear weapons are not scrapped, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, they will be used in war.  Nations (and before them, competing territories) have engaged in war for thousands of years, and for these wars they have been tempted to draw upon the most powerful weapons in their arsenals.  Today, such weapons are nuclear weapons—some 23,000 of them.  Although supporters of these weapons maintain that they deter nuclear war, there is no reason to assume that nuclear deterrence works, or at least works in all cases.  This is indicated by the U.S. government’s pursuit of national missile defense and its attempts to head off other nations (e.g. Iran) from developing nuclear weapons.
    2. If nuclear weapons are not scrapped, it is inevitable that additional nations will develop them.  When some nations maintain large, devastating nuclear arsenals, it is naïve to expect other nations to tamely sit back and accept their non-nuclear status.  Over the decades, this situation of military inequality has spurred on nuclear proliferation and, unless nuclear nations divest themselves of their nuclear weapons, it will continue to do so.
    3. If nuclear weapons are not scrapped, it is likely that they will be used by terrorists.  Terrorists do not have the production facilities for building or testing nuclear weapons, but they have the possibility of obtaining them, though theft or bribery, from national arsenals.  While nuclear weapons exist in national arsenals, obtaining and using them against civilian populations will provide a constant temptation to terrorists.
    4. If nuclear weapons are not scrapped, it is likely that they will be exploded accidentally.  Numerous nuclear accidents—from nuclear weapons dropped to mistaken nuclear war alerts—have already occurred, although so far without detonation.  In an age of BP oil explosions and other technological disasters, there are limits to how long we can press our luck with nuclear weapons technology.
    5. If nuclear weapons are not scrapped, they—and the uranium mining, warhead production, and testing they necessitate—will continue to pollute the earth with radioactive waste for thousands of years.  Nuclear waste disposal is already a very significant problem in the United States, and, not surprisingly, no state has yet volunteered to serve as the permanent dumping ground for it.

    In short, while nuclear weapons exist, we are living on the brink of an unprecedented catastrophe.

    Thus, if we are wise, we should draw back from the brink and address the problem posed by nuclear weapons.  If the U.S. government and others are serious about building a nuclear weapons-free world, they should begin negotiations on a nuclear abolition treaty.  And, if they are not serious about nuclear abolition, the public should raise enough of a ruckus so that they have no alternative to becoming serious.

    If we can’t live with the Bomb, we should begin planning to get rid it.

  • President Obama Is on the Right Track

    This article was originally published on the National Journal Experts’ Blog

    President Obama is on the right track with his multiple efforts to reduce nuclear dangers.  I only wish that it were a faster track and reflected a greater sense of urgency.  His policies take account of some important current realities: The Cold War has ended (20 years ago); the greatest threat confronting the US and the world is no longer all-out nuclear war, but nuclear proliferation and nuclear-armed terrorists; and the United States has obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to engage in “good faith” negotiations to achieve total nuclear disarmament. 

    The Obama administration made a smart move by ruling out using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that are in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.  It could have gone further, though.  While the administration surely sees its posture as a useful threat for states not in compliance, this is a two-edged sword.  Such threats also send a message to the rest of the world that the US still finds nuclear weapons useful and is willing to threaten their use.  This continued reliance on nuclear weapons reinforces the current double standards of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” which in the long run will not hold.  Some states may be encouraged, as was North Korea, to pursue nuclear weapons capabilities in the belief that they can deter an attack by a more powerful adversary.

    The nuclear weapons reductions in the New START agreement are modest and leave more than enough capability on each side to destroy civilization, but they are a step forward and they do extend the important verification provisions of the first START agreement.  They should be seen as a platform from which to continue the downward movement in nuclear arms to zero.  Ultimately, zero is the only safe, secure and stable number of nuclear weapons in the world. 

    The US has enormous conventional force capability.  While this allows us to reduce our reliance upon nuclear weapons, it also creates problems with the Russians in achieving further nuclear reductions.  Russia has repeatedly expressed concerns with our missile defense deployments, our unwillingness to curtail space weaponization, and our Prompt Global Strike program that would entail putting conventional warheads on ICBMs.  To get to substantially lower levels of nuclear arms and finally to zero, we are going to have to meet the concerns of the Russians and other countries that we are not simply making the world safe for US conventional weapons superiority.

    Realists such as former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger support the new nuclear posture of the Obama administration.  Critics such as Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain are playing nuclear politics with loaded barrels, pursuing outdated nuclear policies that are MAD in all senses, not only policies of Mutual Assured Destruction but policies based upon Mutual Assured Delusions.  We cannot continue to base our security on nuclear weapons without running the risk of massive and catastrophic disaster.  

    I would urge President Obama to move rapidly in building on the progress he has made to this point.  There is no scenario that would justify US use of nuclear weapons again.  Nuclear deterrence is unstable and dangerous.  Deterrence is a theory and it cannot be proven to be effective under all conditions in the future.  It came close to failing on various occasions during the Cold War.  Deterrence relies upon rationality, and it remains a dangerous assumption that all leaders will act rationally at all times.  Deterrence is subject to human fallibility, and human fallibility and nuclear weapons are a flammable mixture.

    A stronger indication that President Obama is indeed committed to seeking “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” would be a policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons, coupled with taking the weapons off hair-trigger alert and continuing to work with the Russians and soon other nuclear weapon states on major reductions in arsenals.  We should be pursuing a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  US leadership for this will be essential.

  • Reaching Zero

    This article was originally published by The Nation

    What is the purpose, if any, of the nuclear bomb, that brooding presence that has shadowed all human life for sixty-five years? The question has haunted the nuclear age. It may be that no satisfactory answer has ever been given. Nuclear strategic thinking, in particular, has disappointed. Many of its pioneers have wound up in a state of something like despair regarding their art. For example, Bernard Brodie, one of the originators of nuclear strategy in the 1940s, was forced near the end of his life to realize that “nuclear strategy itself–the body of thoughts that he himself had helped formulate–was something of an illusion,” according to historian Fred Kaplan. In the introduction to The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Lawrence Freedman airs the suspicion that the phrase “nuclear strategy” may be a “contradiction in terms.” Henry Kissinger, a leading figure in nuclear strategizing for a half-century, has expressed a similar feeling of futility. In a remarkable reconsideration, amounting to an oblique recantation of his past thinking, he has written recently in Newsweek:

    The basic dilemma of the nuclear age has been with us since Hiroshima: how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that are being pursued. Any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign-policy objectives. Efforts to develop a more nuanced application have never succeeded, from the doctrine of a geographically limited nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s to the “mutual assured destruction” theory of general nuclear war in the 1970s.

    Now a new moment, full of fresh promise but also with novel perils, has arrived in the nuclear story, and all the old questions have to be asked again. As if responding to some secret signal sent out by a restless zeitgeist, the globe is seething with events large and small in the nuclear arena. Here in the United States, certainly, all the policy pots on the nuclear stove are at a boil. Soon, the Obama administration will complete its overdue Nuclear Posture Review, a statement that Congress requires of the president every four years on the disposition of the country’s nuclear forces.

    It will give the administration’s answer to the key questions: What nuclear forces should the United States deploy? Why? What, if anything, does the United States propose to do with them? On April 8 the United States and Russia will sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) agreement, which will reduce warheads to 1,550 on each side and restrict delivery vehicles to 800 apiece. Also in early April, President Obama will hold a Nuclear Security Summit with the heads of state of forty-four other nations to consider measures to prevent the diversion of nuclear weapon materials into unauthorized hands. In early May will come the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which is a kind of nuclear posture review for the entire world. Decisions on passage of the long-rejected Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as a resurrected Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are also likely very soon.

    The key question, of course, is whether the policies and actions will meet the mounting perils of the new situation. What’s needed for success, I will suggest, is a revival precisely of the discredited art of nuclear strategic thinking, which may, with suitable adjustments, yet have something to offer us. Strategy, military thinkers have long told us, is the art of marrying up tactical means with broad political ends. That is exactly what is most sorely missing in nuclear policy today. Certainly, no mere piecemeal examination will suffice. A comprehensive approach is needed.

    The Nuclear Surge

    For taken together, the dangers mark the world’s arrival at a new stage in the evolution of nuclear danger, forcing fundamental decisions on nuclear and nonnuclear powers alike. In a word, the nuclear predicament is coming of age, which is to say that it is fulfilling a potential that every competent scientist has known it possessed since the advent of the bomb in 1945: nuclear technology, no longer the preserve of a few privileged powers, is becoming available on a global basis. This is because of the simple but decisive fact that the bomb is based on scientific knowledge, which is in its nature unconfinable. This spread is at the heart of the growing nuclear peril–a kind of nuclear surge–in today’s world.

    To say that the technology is becoming available to all, however, is not to say that it is possessed by all or even that it will be. It means only that if nations or others want it, they will be able to have it. Japan, for example, does not have a nuclear bomb. But one is available to Japan in short order if it so chooses. According to the State Department, the bomb is thus available to some fifty other countries. This number of potential nuclear powers is destined to grow. If those countries do not build the bomb, the reason can only be a domestic and international political decision that they should not. The more this availability spreads (as it must), the higher and stronger the political barriers against proliferation must become.

    Of course, at a certain point, which may not be far off, availability, if not possession, will spill beyond national confines and reach smaller groups. At that point the political walls will have to be high and strong indeed. Otherwise, a nuclear 9/11 may be upon us.

    Obviously, any deliberate spread of nuclear technology, such as the “renaissance” of nuclear power that has apparently begun, will only accelerate the surge.

    This underlying and irreversible pressure of availability is the backdrop for today’s widespread and well-founded dread that proliferation by just a few countries–above all, North Korea and Iran–will push the world over what the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, a group set up by the Japanese and Australian governments, calls a “tipping point,” precipitating a “cascade” of proliferation that will wash away the current nuclear order. South Asia has of course already gone nuclear, with India and Pakistan engaged in an arms race. India, aping the United States, has planned a triad of air, land and sea nuclear forces while impoverished, crisis-ridden Pakistan struggles to keep up.

    The Middle East and East Asia, led by Iran and North Korea, could become the next regions to travel down this path. According to the Washington Post, A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s bomb and the arch-proliferator of its nuclear technology, has said that Iranian officials asked him in the 1980s to sell them ready-made bombs. Since then Iran has appeared to many to be using its right to develop nuclear power technology as a pathway to building the bomb from scratch. If it does, other countries in the Middle East may well follow suit. More immediately, Iran and nuclear-armed Israel would find themselves in a perilous balance–or rather, extreme imbalance, since Israel already has an undeclared arsenal of perhaps 200 warheads. If North Korea, which already has the bomb, refuses, as seems likely, to give it up under pressure from the world community, then something similar could happen in East Asia, and Japan might indeed produce its own bomb.

    And yet if it’s tempting to some in the United States and elsewhere to define the new nuclear moment solely as a crisis of proliferation, they should be brought up short by a single brute fact: more than 95 percent of the world’s 23,000 or so nuclear warheads remain in the possession of two countries: the United States, with some 9,000, and Russia, with some 13,000.

    If one ineluctable truth of Year 65 of the bomb is that the sources of nuclear danger are destined to be global, another is that the world’s existing arsenals are likewise indivisibly global. They are joined in a kind of unity of hostility. Each nuclear nation (Israel, which has no nuclear adversary, may be the odd man out) cites the arsenal of another or others as the rationale for possessing its own, in multiple chains that link them together into a network of threats and counterthreats. For example, in one such chain, Pakistan fears India, which fears China, which fears Russia, which fears the United States. This network of terror and counterterror underscores another truth of the nuclear age: every possessor of the bomb, by its very existence, teaches possible proliferators a pair of lessons that are the prime (if not the only) motives for proliferation. First, you will be living in a nuclear-armed world; second, if you want to be protected in that world you must have nuclear arms yourself. (In addition, it has of course occurred to many countries, especially North Korea and Iran, that nuclear weapons could deter overwhelming conventional power such as that possessed by the United States.) From national points of view, each arsenal is distinct, but from a global proliferation point of view they are a joint inducement for the further spread of nuclear arms.

    The necessary conclusion is clear: proliferation can’t be stopped unless possession is dealt with concurrently. In the seventh decade of the nuclear age, the time for half-solutions is over. The head of state with his finger on the button of some aging cold war arsenal, the head of state itching to put his finger on such a button, the nuclear power operator, the nuclear smuggler and the terrorist in his hideout dreaming of unparalleled mass murder are actors on a single playing field. In this respect, too, the nuclear dilemma has become indivisibly global.

    This is a truth, however, that the world’s nine nuclear powers do not like to acknowledge, because it has an implication they are reluctant to accept, which is that if they want to be safe from nuclear danger they must commit themselves to surrendering their own nuclear arms.

    Strategic Incoherence

    And yet that is exactly what Barack Obama did in his speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, saying, “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Encouragingly, his commitment has been accompanied by the widest support for nuclear abolition since President Harry Truman sent Bernard Baruch to ask the world in 1946 to choose between “the quick and the dead.” For one thing, a remarkable phalanx of former and current officials, Republican as well as Democratic, have embraced the goal. Their calls originated with the by-now-famous article by the “Gang of Four”–former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn–who in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article announced their support for “a world free of nuclear weapons” and called for “working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.” This unlikely foursome harked back to the previously underappreciated fact that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, at their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, had come within an ace of agreeing to nuclear abolition. (The deal foundered because Gorbachev would agree to it only if Reagan dropped his Strategic Defense Initiative, and Reagan would not.) Today, a majority of former secretaries of state and defense support a world free of nuclear weapons.

    A remarkable number of new government and civil panels, commissions and other initiatives have also sprung up to support the goal. Among them is a new group, Global Zero, which proposes abolition by 2030 and is supported by a Who’s Who of international as well as American signatories, including, for example, Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter and former GOP Senator Chuck Hagel. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Nuclear Threat Initiative all have serious, well-funded programs to scout the path to zero and determine what would be required to stay there. Meanwhile, the traditional antinuclear movement, led by such groups as Peace Action, the American Friends Service Committee and the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, are marshaling support for a nuclear weapons convention.

    If Obama’s commitment to abolition and the movement in support of it were setting the tone and agenda of current nuclear negotiations, the world might now be in the first stage of a final solution (to give that dread phrase a new and positive meaning) of the nuclear dilemma. Each proposal in the negotiations would be weighed in the light of the distance it traveled toward a nuclear-weapons-free world. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Instead, what have been offered are at best a series of timid makeshifts or, at worst, de facto subversion of the Prague objective. If this trend continues, it is entirely possible that the ultimate mockery will occur: nuclear arsenals will march forward into the future under a banner that reads Ban the Bomb.

    Let us consider two policy arenas: the START agreement and the Nuclear Posture Review.

    Nothing on the nuclear stage today is stranger or less adequately explained than the spectacle, still on view twenty years after the end of the cold war, of the United States and Russia holding each other hostage to nuclear annihilation with arsenals in the thousands poised on alert. The current agreement, which will remain in force until 2020, sets a ceiling of 1,550 warheads on each side that must be reached by 2017. The reduction from the old ceiling of 2,200 is of course welcome. The continuation of a system of inspections is even more welcome. But what are we to make of the 1,550 warheads that remain? After all, the limit on the 1,550 is also a permission for the 1,550. The arrangement indefinitely leaves intact the essential fact that the United States and Russia are poised to blow each other up many times over, as if the cold war had never ended. What is that about?

    If strategy is the art of using tactics to achieve political ends, then the persistence of these arsenals represents its nemesis. What political purpose is served? There is no quarrel between the two nations that would justify deployment of even a single nuclear weapon. An answer is often made that the United States must have such an arsenal because Russia still does–as a “deterrent.” But this begs the question. For today, as in the past forty years, since the beginning of arms control agreements in 1972, the size of the US arsenal has of course been a negotiated figure. The question is not, as is sometimes pretended, whether in the face of a Russian threat the United States needs to protect itself and size its forces accordingly; it is what figure the two sides should jointly set in talks like the ones just concluded. What stopped Hillary Clinton when she went to Moscow from proposing a force on each side of, say, 300 weapons, as has been suggested by a prominent Air Force officer and two Air University professors recently in Strategic Studies Quarterly? For that matter, why not zero? That step admittedly would require bringing the other nuclear powers into the talks. But why not do that–or at least set a time frame for doing so, thereby explicitly linking the current agreement to the president’s announced goal?

    It is here that the strategic deficit becomes most glaring. It’s not just that tactics have lost contact with political goals, it is that nuclear tactics (in this case, deployments) are weighed without any reference to politics whatsoever. Admittedly, the possibility of Russia backsliding into hostilities with the United States is sometimes cited as a reason for strategic “hedging,” but the obvious next question is whether the United States would prefer to be in a nuclear confrontation with a backslid Russia or in a merely conventional confrontation. Has Washington decided that in case of any hostilities nuclear confrontations are preferable to nonnuclear ones?

    Behind this issue looms a larger unasked strategic question. Are nations in general safer when they aim nuclear weapons at one another (“deter” one another)? Are some pairs safer and others not? Which ones? For example, do Americans think India and Pakistan were wise in 1998 to jointly go nuclear and threaten each other with annihilation? Are they safer today for having taken that step? The refusal of the United States and Russia to show the way by denuclearizing their own relationship is an answer that speaks louder than the Prague commitment and undercuts it. That refusal says that nuclear weapons are useful and do make you safer. But this lesson cuts the legs out from under any serious nonproliferation effort. Wasn’t the need for nonproliferation where we began? Isn’t that now the main professed goal of the United States in the nuclear field? Here is strategic incoherence in its acutest form. Deployments to meet a vanished threat spoil any effort to deal with a current real one.

    What we have heard so far of the Nuclear Posture Review exemplifies the same intellectual debacle. Reportedly, the document will reject the proposal for “no first use.” No first use is the policy of using nuclear weapons only in retaliation for nuclear attacks. All other attacks, including ones with biological or chemical weapons, would be met by conventional forces.

    The rejection of no first use would crystallize, as perhaps nothing else can, the strategic disarray of American nuclear policy. Like the persistence of the forces of mutual assured destruction, it would represent the banishment of politics from strategy (meaning in fact that strategy no longer is strategy). The first-use policy was born in the 1950s, when US leaders believed they could deter perceived Soviet conventional superiority in Europe only by threatening a nuclear response. Is it really necessary to state once again that the cold war is over? Apparently it is, because in this arena, too, news of the geopolitical revolution of 1989-91 has yet to reach the American strategic brain. There, “extended deterrence” seems to be permanently planted on the basis of a kind of incurable nostalgia for the cold war. Fantastically, surreally, the United States is still using nuclear arms to repel a Russian conventional attack on Europe, as if it were 1958. (We might as well say “Soviet attack,” since the threat is imaginary.) This obsolete readiness is symbolically embodied in the deployment even today of some 200 American tactical nuclear warheads in Europe, ready at a moment’s notice to repel Soviet hordes coming through the Fulda Gap. In February, five of the European countries thus “defended” (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway) recommended that the weapons be withdrawn. Washington is still thinking about it.

    More important for today’s concerns is that a no-first-use policy is the sine qua non of any effective nonproliferation strategy. If nuclear weapons are needed not only to counter other nuclear weapons but to repel conventional, chemical and biological attacks as well, then what responsible national leader can afford to do without them? The problem is not merely symbolic. If the nine nuclear powers are ready to use their arms to perform a grab bag of tasks, then the dangers to nonnuclear countries really do multiply, perhaps inspiring them to acquire these devices, evidently so versatile and useful, for themselves.

    Toward a New Nuclear Strategy

    To escape from this scene of halfhearted and ineffectual measures serving unclear or contradictory goals, the United States needs new strategic thinking. In exploring what it should be, perhaps it will be useful to look back at past strategic thought.

    The great intellectual artifact of cold war strategy was the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. It adopted a new aim for military deployments. In the renowned words of Bernard Brodie in 1946, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.” This insight, which was recognized as a basis of policy in the early 1960s by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, marked a true revolution in military affairs. Broadly speaking, war-fighting strategies were replaced by war-not-fighting strategies. Not to fight, according to this policy, was to win. And yet under this policy the way not to fight was nevertheless to plan to fight. The trick was to restrict the plan for fighting to nuclear retaliation, in the hope that that day would never come. Thus was born the paradoxical, or contradictory, policy on which survival in the nuclear age was believed to rest. Safety from nuclear destruction depended not on getting rid of the arms that threatened it but on threats to inflict that same nuclear destruction.

    In retrospect, it seems the doctrine of deterrence has been a true Janus: it has been based on one thoroughgoing absurdity and one profound truth. The absurdity was the idea that you could lastingly and reliably avoid an action–mutual suicide in a nuclear war–by threatening the action. The problem, as many critics noted, was that at any given moment–but especially in a crisis–you did not know whether you would get the nuclear non-use that was the new strategic goal or the use whose threat was the tactical means to achieve the non-use. Strategists and moralists twisted and turned in the coils of this dilemma, even as the world lived (as it still technically lives) on the knife-edge of catastrophe. Moralists pondered the virtue of threatening a crime in order not to commit it; strategists wondered how a threat of “suicide” (McNamara) could be “credible” to the one so threatened. None of them found answers, yet the policy became so deeply ingrained in policy circles that today people refer to the American nuclear arsenal as “our deterrent,” as if the hardware and its alleged purpose were one.

    And yet the doctrine did also rest on one profound truth–its acknowledgment that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” as Reagan and Gorbachev put it in 1985.Implicit in this revolution in military affairs was a strategic revolution. The political gains that governments had pursued through wars were given up, now replaced by a need to preserve the peace, which itself became the only sane strategic objective. You might say that deterrence has pursued a sane goal by insane means–a cleavage manifested in the fact that even as deterrence fought off nuclear use, and in a certain sense fortified what has been called the “nuclear taboo” and the “tradition of non-use,” it at the same time pinioned the world permanently on the brink of such use.

    Is it then possible that abolition can be seen as a rectification and completion of the strategic revolution begun but left unfinished by deterrence? How great, after all, would be the shift from the strategic goal of “non-use,” or the “tradition of non-use,” to the strategic goal of “nonpossession,” to a “tradition of nonpossession”? Doesn’t non-use in a way already cast nuclear weapons on history’s scrap heap?

    It is a peculiarity of deterrence that the weapons themselves, rather than political developments, dictate the strategic aim (non-use). In its pathological form, this peculiarity leads to the divorce of deployments and posture from politics that we see now. But in the benign form of abolition, the strategy dictated by arms and the strategy dictated by policy would coincide. Both would say, with the new Henry Kissinger: there is no quarrel in the world worth a nuclear war, so don’t fight one or arm yourself to do so.

    The conclusion is strengthened when you recall that even at zero, deterrence does not melt away completely. The reason is that the roots of the nuclear dilemma lie in inextinguishable advances in scientific knowledge. For even as this knowledge could permit cheaters to violate an abolition agreement, so it would permit the international community to respond in kind. The point is not to propose overelaborate schemes of nuclear rearmament if a crisis were to occur at zero (the conventional forces of the threatened international community would surely suffice) but to point out that there is no sharp discontinuity, as is often suggested, between the “minimum deterrence” represented by, say, a few hundred weapons and zero. Rather there is a smooth continuity all the way to zero, and even beyond, as political and legal as well as technical arrangements needed to keep the world at zero gradually strengthened. Unfortunately, technical bans are all in principle reversible. It has been otherwise with a few moral and legal revolutions, including the abolition of slavery, and there is reason to hope that the abolition of nuclear arms would be one of these. When that happened, deterrence would have been left finally and completely behind.

    The Architecture of Zero

    The needed change is to turn abolition from a far-off goal into an active organizing principle that gives direction to everything that is done in the nuclear arena–in other words, a strategic goal. The indivisible nuclear surge under way in today’s world can be mastered only with an indivisible program to defeat it. Let us, then, borrowing from Obama in Prague, take “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” as the new strategic objective–the political goal in the pursuit of which all tactics become the means. That goal has two requisites. The first is getting rid of existing nuclear weapons. The tactical means to that goal are of course negotiations among the nuclear powers. The second requisite is building a system that safeguards the world from the recrudescence of nuclear weapons once they are gone. This system will be the true architecture of zero. The tactical means to that goal are negotiating an ever-tightening web of restrictions imposed on all technology usable for nuclear weapons.

    Of the two, the second is more difficult. For while the process of nuclear disarmament will continue for only a limited time, until zero is reached, the architecture of zero must be built to last forever, since the knowledge that underlies nuclear weapons will never disappear. The tactics for reaching this goal only begin with the construction of systems of inspection and enforcement. More important over the long run is building a political and legal order in which the attempt to build a nuclear weapon would be designated a crime against humanity. More important still would be the moral deepening of the taboo.

    The art of strategy–so notably absent in today’s contradictory mélange of policies–is to combine the measures needed to achieve the two goals into a single, coherent, self-reinforcing plan. Above all, the nonproliferation efforts that are the precursors to an architecture of zero are in mortal need of the united planetary political will that can be created only by a clear, credible commitment to a time-bound plan for abolition to which all nuclear powers are formally agreed. It should take the form of a commitment to create the sort of nuclear weapons convention that the antinuclear movement has long advocated–one that, as noted earlier, seeks to ban all weapons of mass destruction.

    To postpone abolition is to postpone nonproliferation. Today arms control and nonproliferation proceed in two parallel negotiating universes–the NPT review on the one side and START talks on the other. The two need to be brought together in a simple bargain that is already implicit in the provisions of the NPT: the nuclear powers will surrender their arsenals on condition that other powers agree not to obtain any.

    Such a strategy would build on the truth underlying deterrence doctrine while gradually retiring its absurd features. It would enable nuclear strategy, at last, to catch up with history. It would deliver Russia and the United States from the weapons-forged hostility that politically no longer exists. It would unify the world around a common goal–one already embraced under the NPT by 184 countries and enshrined in their laws. Nuclear states (as long as they persist as such) would be at one with nonnuclear states in preventing proliferation, even as they all worked together to put in place the architecture of zero that would make the ban permanent and safe. Finally, the strategy would provide a measuring rod for judging the merit of interim steps, such as START and no first use. They would be judged by the specific contribution they made to reaching the common strategic goal. To give some examples: adoption of no first use by all nuclear powers would be highly valued as a way station toward abolition. In principle at least, nuclear weapons would have been completely retired from use, for if no one strikes first, no one can strike in retaliation–thus no one will strike with a nuclear weapon at all, and no one will threaten to do so.

    Arms reductions would, of course, have value as steps toward zero; but the inspection regimes accompanying them would be especially prized, not just for their own sake but because an ever-stronger regime of inspection is a sine qua non of life in a world without nuclear weapons.

    Influence would flow from nonproliferation measures to arms control as well. The more nonnuclear-weapons states accepted stringent inspections, the more they permitted transparency of their nuclear facilities and the more they accepted restrictions on withdrawal from the NPT, the more ready would the nuclear powers be, less afraid now of cheating, to surrender their arsenals.

    What would nuclear weapons then be for? They almost tell us themselves. “We are here,” they say, “to abolish ourselves, and–a big bonus–to put up a barrier to major power war forever after into the bargain. For even after you are rid of us, we will hover in the wings, as a potential that cannot ever be removed.” The bomb is waiting for us to hear the message. It has been waiting a long time. If we do not, it can always return to what has always been its plan B, and abolish us.