What Richard Perle and Andrew Marshall think you should know about nuclear weapons

Stuck at home in a blizzard, I'm catching up with my DVR and found the following gem of an exchange that took place at the Hudson Institute on February 23, 2009 and was aired on C-Span 2's Book TV at 1:30 am on March 16, 2009.

The event celebrated the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s publication of Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter edited by Henry Sokolski and Robert Zarate (Strategic Studies Institute, January 2009) featuring discussion from Richard Perle and Andrew Marshall.

Henry Sokolski: do you have any thoughts, either of you, about what we should be encouraging in the way of education of young people who are interested in foreign affairs and military affairs or what we should be asking or demanding of the studies that are funded by the United States Government that deal with these topics? How shall I put it, let's leave Albert and Roberta out of it.

Richard Perle: My immediate reaction to that is that what we should be teaching is not the conclusions they arrived at or, for that matter, the substance of their research, but the tools, the methodology. I can't imagine a better way to bring a young student along than to give him the famous Base Study and invite him to reflect on the mode of analysis that is reflected in it. It was the rigor and discipline they brought to every issue they examined. Now, as it happens, many of those issues are still with us and I think they have a great deal to contribute in the way we think about those issues, but far more important is respect for their approach to the analysis of issues and there is much too little of that today in universities and government funded research programs.

Andrew Marshall: Well, I would certainly second that, I think in addition other things I've written suggest reading a lot of history. Clearly, one of the things you want people to understand is the uncertainty of things; how you really need to look at a variety of alternative futures. Any notion that you know what's going to happen is not going to work.

Ambassador Max Kampelman on Nuclear Disarmament

Ambassador Max Kampelman, the Democrat who became President Ronald Reagan’s arms control negotiator and who is argued to have initiated the new political momentum behind nuclear disarmament, addressed faculty and students at the Elliott School of International Affairs on November 9, 2009. Ambassador Kampelman recommended research and policy engagement by institutions of higher education to respond to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Observing that “political scientists ought to know how to get things done,” he contended that academic research should include questions of how policy might shape political outcomes. He suggested additional research focused on how to build consensus domestically and globally around how the world “ought” to be and the steps necessary to move in that direction. He also suggested research into how the historic experience of arms control could inform policy to respond to today’s challenges. Noting an absence of institutional and coordinative mechanisms for resolving policy uncertainty related to nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, Ambassador Kampelman emphasized the value convening and policy engagement to bridge different perspectives on the challenge of nuclear disarmament, as well as new research on how to advance toward this increasingly important policy objective. Watch the video of Ambassador Kampelman’s public remarks here.

Newsweek misrepresents nuclear weapons scholarship

Jonathan Tepperman’s thesis in his September 7th Newsweek article “Why Obama should Learn to Love the Bomb” that “a growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous” badly misrepresents the state of scholarship on this crucial topic.

First, Tepperman references a handful of scholars to make his argument while dismissing the majority who disagree with him. George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn opposed this view in two op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and other leading scholars and practitioners participated in a 2007 conference at Stanford University, now memorialized as a 500-page volume, Reykjavik Revisited. Scores of experts are summarily excluded from Tepperman’s article.

Second, Tepperman suggests a robust understanding of how deterrence relates to today’s challenges where none exists. Nuclear deterrence scholar Sir Lawrence Freedman observed a “lost generation” of nuclear weapons specialists in remarks at the Elliott School of International Affairs this spring and Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, General Kevin Chilton, observed this summer “we have allowed an entire generation to skip class, as it were, on the subject of strategic deterrence.” More scholarship is needed to translate “nuclear optimism” and other Cold War concepts into the Twenty-first Century.

Third, in over 2,700 words on deterrence, not one of them is “accident.” This is a catastrophic flaw in characterizing scholarly debate on nuclear weapons. Kenneth Waltz, cited by Tepperman as “the leading nuclear optimist” underlines this point by co-authoring a book titled The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed with Stanford University’s Scott Sagan who has done decades of careful scholarship to demonstrate the relevance of accidents to nuclear deterrence.

Tepperman’s “iron logic” of deterrence is undermined by a more unstable plutonium logic that can only be understood by the combined lights of physics, engineering, political science, economics, and at least more than a dozen other disciplines that James Doyle of Los Alamos National Laboratory argues constitute “nuclear security science.” The nuclear future ahead of us is long, imperfect, and badly in need of more research and more informed public debate.