arms control sweet spot

A Walk the Senate should take

Last night's Washington opening of the American Ensemble Theater production of A Walk in the Woods could not be more timely.

Lee Blessing's Pulitzer-nominated play casts two people with the awesome responsibility to reduce the risk of nuclear war through negotiated arms reductions. This brilliant and well-acted play highlights the urgent necessity and daunting challenge of responding to the danger posed by nuclear weapons just in time, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to take its most important vote on arms control in a generation by the end of the month. Statesmanship will be at a premium in consideration of this landmark agreement, as the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) between the United States and Russia moves to the Senate floor where a two-thirds majority -- and therefore bipartisan cooperation -- will be necessary to ratify it.

In the play, negotiators John Honeyman and Andrey Botvinnik represent the Cold War adversaries, the United States, and the Soviet Union respectively. They struggle to reach an agreement. Many wish them to fail, and their argument, and friendship, resonate with the issues under debate over the new START Treaty.

Some argue that nuclear weapons make war too horrible for any "rational" leader to risk. Blessing's Soviet presciently observes how globalization complicates this delicate logic: "Once we only had to be rational in English and Russian." Today we must do so in more languages and perhaps with terrorists who have no territory or population for us to threaten. And as the Gulf oil spill attests, accidents happen. Nuclear weapons endanger human civilization.

Blessing's heroes offer hope by rising from their seats and opening their imaginations to each other. History agrees. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, arms negotiators moved their work from Geneva's gilded halls to the sauna, the target range, and the pool - and over countless vodka toasts, we made a lot of progress.

A generation later, over 22 thousand nuclear weapons remain. This spring, U.S. and Russian negotiators concluded a new arms reduction treaty, but now face domestic politics in both countries. In Washington, the Senate began hearings on ratification of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty earlier this month and will receive a new National Intelligence Estimate on its effects in a matter of days. Earlier this year, the U.S. Government proposed $180 billion in new spending related to nuclear weapons. Some political leaders argue that this is not enough - that we should resume nuclear explosive testing and develop new nuclear weapons. As Blessing observes of our efforts to escape nuclear annihilation, "sometimes the hawks eat a few doves."

Still, survival requires that someone take up this work, and the brave few who do have each other. Why should arms negotiators become friends? Andrey Botvinnik argues "because someone has to."

The United States and the world would be more secure if every Senator and staffer involved in foreign affairs saw this production.

Not all of them will, but you still can. Three of the five performances of this important production are already sold out, a few tickets remain for the 11:30 a.m. show on Saturday (July 17) and the 3:00 p.m. show on the following Saturday (July 24). Get your tickets now.

T family values

Undersecretary of State for International Security and Arms Control Ellen O. Tauscher shared her perspectives on her current tasks and her career with students and faculty of the Elliott School of International Affairs on November 10 as part of the Elliott School's Distinguished Women in International Affairs event series.

Observing that organizational units in the State Department have "code" letters -- "we even have an M, although he's not a secret agent" -- and that her bureau is known as "T," Undersecretary Tauscher related that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has asked her to "resurrect the T family."

“T” could do with some resurrection. Under the leadership of John Bolton, famously hostile not only to arms control but also to the United Nations to which he later represented the United States, the bureau was "reorganized." These reorganizations appear to this outside observer to have significantly degraded the U.S. Government's capacity to lead and sustain international cooperation to prevent the spread or use of nuclear weapons.

Secretary Clinton's direction to Undersecretary Tauscher is thus much needed and reflective of the deep engagement and effective leadership both have shown over time on the challenge of nuclear weapons proliferation.

"Resurrection" is an important and complicated word in this context. Then Undersecretary Bolton's "reorganization" was structural -- it continues to constrain the function of the Bureau after his departure. So Undersecretary Tauscher's resurrection should be structural as well, creating new enduring capacity. A very welcome project to those who believe international law can be used to protect national and global security.

There is, however, an asterisk to this formulation in the mind of longtime observers of the organization of the U.S. Government for proliferation prevention. As the head of the "T family,” Undersecretary Tauscher is one of six undersecretaries. In contrast to the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, she has no foreign government “clients” – she represents only the U.S. Government’s commitment to promote international security through diplomacy.

Sometimes the requirements of effective global nonproliferation align with the requirements of strong bilateral relations with U.S. friends and allies. Sometimes this alignment is more difficult to achieve. In this latter class of cases, it is crucial that the requirements of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons have a strong champion, like Undersecretary Tauscher, to ensure that they are not drowned out by a host of bilateral diplomatic concerns, sometimes with significant economic implications.

This is a major challenge, worthy of the talents of a proven leader like Undersecretary Tauscher. But it used to be a little easier.

From 1961 until 1997, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) was legislatively established as independent of the State Department. This meant that whenever conflicts arose among the various Undersecretaries of State, the requirements of prevention of proliferation or use of weapons of mass destruction could be raised by the ACDA director one-on-one with the Secretary and, if necessary, the President. The ACDA director had his (sadly, the ACDA directorship no longer exist for Ellen Tauscher to break the male monopoly) own seat on the National Security Council reflecting the extraordinary danger weapons of mass destruction pose to U.S. national security. In observing that these dangers persist, we should think carefully about the future structure of the U.S. Government to effectively face them.

Ivanov on Globalizing Nuclear Arms Control Law

David Rising of the Associated Press reports that Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said on February 10, 2008 that Russia and the United States should replace the bilateral arms control agreements of the Cold War and that the time has come

"to open this framework for all leading states interested in cooperation in order to ensure overall security."

Ivanov’s remarks align with recent British statements about the widening of the nuclear arms control process made by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Secretary of State for Defense Des Browne, and former Foreign Secretary Margaret Becket.

Widening the process of negotiated and effectively verified reduction in nuclear weapons to additional states supports compliance with the shared Article VI obligation of all states parties to the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to:

“pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

While some non-nuclear weapons states parties to the NPT have a tradition of taking this obligation seriously, greater engagement and political capital is needed from many states to respond effectively to the increasingly diffuse danger of proliferation of nuclear weapons and related technologies. The new dangers of an increasingly confusing multipolar balance of nuclear weapons capabilities and transnational proliferation rings argue strongly for more international legal constraints agreed among more players. Clear international legal rules are needed in response to these contemporary challenges, Ivanov emphasizes:

"It is imperative to ensure that the provisions of such a regime should be legally binding so that, in due course, it would really become possible to shift to the control over nuclear weapons and the process of their gradual reduction on a multilateral basis.”

While the Bush Administration has preferred its disarmament policy to be unilateral and informal, the fact that both the United Kingdom and Russia have explicitly opened the door to multilateralization of nuclear disarmament negotiations suggests that next steps might be contemplated even while the United States remains disengaged from the process. United States should be preparing now to play a leadership role toward a future regime for the control of nuclear weapons that is legally binding, effectively verified, and multilateral. Watching from the sidelines, we endanger both national and global security by not reflecting our specific perspective, capabilities, and requirements into a process that shows clear signs of both widening and moving forward.

Norwegian Leadership toward a Nuclear Weapon Free World

"Nuclear proliferation is not yesterday's news," Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told an audience organized by the Norwegian Red Cross, "it's a burning question for both today and the future,” Aftenpoften reported today.

The Foreign Minister’s remarks celebrated the 10th anniversary of the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer or Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, also known as the Ottawa Treaty. Recalling complex and stalled efforts to regulate landmines, Foreign Minister Støre observed that:

“The Ottawa process turned these dynamics upside down. Instead of a ‘race to the bottom,’ the participants found themselves in a process where they were constantly being challenged by civil society actors – not on the streets, but in conference halls, at roundtables, in the day-to-day negotiations.”

The Foreign Minister discussed landmines, small arms, and cluster munitions, but expanded significantly on the potential to bring more international voices into the nuclear disarmament discussion:

“In the field of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, Norway is leading a seven-nation initiative to bring states together, on a cross-regional basis, to deal with common challenges. All stakeholders are needed, and in this particular process we have succeeded in mobilising the UK - a nuclear-weapon state - and South Africa - a member of the Non-Aligned Movement.”

Could this effort grow into an “Oslo Process,” broadly engaging global civil society in an effort to promote prudent and verifiable progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons? Many important building blocks of such an effort are already in place or under development, including the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Campaign for a Nuclear Weapon Free World, the call for a 2010 World Summit to eliminate nuclear weapons, the Mayors for Peace Program to Promote Solidarity of Cities Toward the Total Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, the Middle Powers Initiative, the New Agenda Coalition, former Senator Sam Nunn’s vision of “The Mountaintop,” and, of course, the stunningly progressive “Hoover Plan” articulated in a January 4, 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed by George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn.

Jimmy Carter in Defense of Arms Control

In a September 12, 2007 article in the Taipei Times titled, “Nuclear Steps Undermine Peace,” former President Jimmy Carter argues “By abandoning many of the nuclear arms agreements negotiated in the last 50 years, the US has been sending mixed signals to North Korea, Iran and other states with the technical knowledge to create nuclear weapons.”

Take a Sunday drive in your RRW

The Bush Administration appears to be using new talking points to convince Congress and the public that developing a new nuclear warhead is good policy. Both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have been using a new analogy, likening the new thermonuclear warhead that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos are designing to… a restored 1965 Mustang!

From the Department of Defense, General James Cartwright, Commander of US Strategic Command (nominated to become Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) stated during his testimony at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee on March 28, 2007:

“You also want to ensure that they [nuclear warheads] are the most secure that they can be. And we, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s as we put these weapons together, did not have the technologies that we have today for safety and security. We have learned a lot. And we use this example of the 1966 Mustang. Sure, I'd like to have it, but I'm not sure I want to give it to my teenager or grandson without disc brakes, seatbelts, airbags, et cetera. We have the technologies today readily available to make these safe and secure.”

So a new hydrogen bomb would be a fitting gift for his grandson?

From the National Nuclear Security Administration, Thomas D’Agostino, Acting Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, on June 15, 2007 at a briefing at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, as well as at a National Defense University breakfast briefing on May 9, 2007:

“Consider this challenge: Your 1965 Ford Mustang, which you maintain as a collector’s item, has been sitting in your garage for 40 years. You monitor it for such items as a clogged carburetor, corrosion in the engine block and battery discharge, and you replace parts when you deem it necessary. However, you don’t get to start the engine and take it for a test drive. The trick is to assure that if you do need it right away—to take your spouse to the hospital in an emergency—that it would work with certainty. That’s what we have to do in our nuclear weapons life extension program.”

While driving to the hospital at speed and in style sounds great, here is my question: If my spouse needs to go to the hospital, why not call an ambulance? Or use the family car built on a tested design that we know works, rather than a car that has never been tested or driven before?

And how is this like using a nuclear weapon to threaten hundreds of thousands of people with instant death? It isn’t.

New nuclear warheads are unnecessary (because, while the oldest nuclear weapons date to 1970 as referenced by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the 2006 JASON group report on plutonium pit aging concluded that the triggers for nuclear weapons have “credible lifetimes of at least 100 years,” resulting in the plutonium pits in the current warheads remaining viable for at least another 60 years). New nuclear warheads also undermine US non-proliferation efforts (because the modernization of the US arsenal brings into question the United States’ commitment under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty).

Aside from these arguments against developing new nuclear warheads, it remains uncertain whether a new warhead design would actually be more reliable compared to proven designs which have benefited from over 1000 tests.

In fact, prominent nuclear weapon scientist Dr. Richard Garwin, who contributed to the design the first thermonuclear weapons, in his testimony before the Energy & Water Development Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on March 29, 2007, stated that:

“The technical question as to whether the weapon can with confidence be placed into the stockpile after development but without nuclear explosion testing deserves more study” and “ Beyond the technical judgment of engineers and scientists, however, is the question whether at some future time after the weapon enters into service there may be political questioning by some president or presidential hopeful, or even by some future STRATCOM commander about the wisdom of having a growing stockpile of untested nuclear weapons. It seems likely that such high-level concerns would lead to a nuclear explosion test…”

There will be many more arguments made by supporters of new nuclear warheads, but I hope they put forth national security justifications that include more than weak analogies to antique muscle cars from the 1960s.

In the meantime, if we’re going spend millions of tax dollars on a design (Phase 2A) of a new nuclear warhead and on a cost study anyway, I’d like the RRW to have satellite radio and heated seats.

We'll always have Votkinsk

Reuters reports that on Tuesday Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov was quoted by Interfax in remarks in Votkinsk, Russia that his country has begun mass producing Topol-M inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs): "we are now entering a new and crucial stage of reequipping all of the strategic nuclear forces and operational and tactical systems."

Verification fans will recall Votkinsk fondly as the site of the first on-site inspections for verification of negotiated limits on nuclear arms agreed to by the former Soviet Union under the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty – a Treaty Russia threatened to leave in February. Although U.S. and Russian on-site inspection rights under the Treaty ended in 2001, continued observance of the Treaty’s limitation reflects both the shared interest in avoiding a resumed arms race and a hopeful model for global limitations on intermediate range missiles.

Both purposes appear to have lost their charm for President Vladimir Putin. When asked by Doug Saunders of The Globe and Mail earlier this month how Russia might respond to the proposed American deployment of a missile defense system in Europe, President Putin specifically denied that Russian missile acquisition and potential abandonment of the INF Treaty are linked to the proposal, but replied that “As far as the INF treaty is concerned, this is a broader issue and it does not relate directly to missile defence systems of the United States. The thing is that only the United States and the Russian Federation bear the burden of not developing intermediate-range missiles, and the other countries are involved in this – Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Korea, South Korea even, as far as I'm concerned. . . . If everyone complied with it, then it would be clear, but when other countries in the world are fighting to pursue such efforts, then I do not understand why the U.S. and Russia should place such restrictions on themselves. We are considering what we should do in order to ensure our security . . . a lot of countries are involved in these efforts, including our neighbours. I repeat that this does not have anything to do with the U.S. plans to deploy missile defences in Europe. We are going to find responses to both threats, though.”

While one may think President Putin protests the linkage to European missile defense a bit too much, and find his suggestion that a global treaty would be better to be cynical, the U.S. effort to multilateralize the INF Treaty following the fall of the former Soviet Union suggests the sort of expansion of verification provisions developed during the Cold War that could contribute to greater global confidence in a strengthened nonproliferation regime.

Unlikely as it seems today, and even as Votkinsk becomes the birthplace of a new generation of Russian ICBMs, we should keep in mind that if we succeed in realizing President Reagan’s vision of a world free of nuclear weapons – given new life in January in the Wall Street Journal by George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn – Votkinsk (along with Magna, Utah) will be where on-site inspection for nuclear disarmament was first achieved and this counterintuitive achievement should remind us that positive change is possible through careful and innovative diplomacy.

Trust, but verify with the Washington Times

Here’s an excerpt from Doug's letter to the editor in today’s Washington Times:

“nuclear weaponry and strategic deterrence no longer receive the serious national deliberation they should. Mr. Gaffney's call for a national debate is doubly important because he is wrong about everything else.”

Click here for the full letter (it’s the second one down, after the sexeducrats).