US National Security Policy And Nuclear Weapons: Perspectives on the Nuclear Posture Review

Originally published here.

Last week, physicist and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, and Catholic Bishop Howard J. Hubbard published a passionately worded op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution entitled “Nuclear threat demands a sustained U.S. effort“.

Here’s an excerpt:

Our leaders must embark on a step-by-step process to prevent the use and spread of these devastating weapons and reduce arsenals worldwide — steps that would make us safer now.

Policy-makers must heed the basic truth that we face two starkly different futures: a world in which the threat of nuclear weapons is remote (or eliminated), or one in which humanity is eventually devastated by their use.

It is a moral choice between life and death… We have a moral obligation and a practical opportunity to reduce the risk from these weapons. We must not squander it.

The editorial is an echo of the general sentiment in the arms control community: we now have a President who has explicitly made nuclear disarmament a cornerstone of his administration, and we are hoping he will stand by his pledges.

Specifically, on September 23, 2009, President Obama made the following statement in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly:

We will pursue a new agreement with Russia to substantially reduce our strategic warheads and launchers.  We will move forward with ratification of the Test Ban Treaty, and work with others to bring the treaty into force so that nuclear testing is permanently prohibited.  We will complete a Nuclear Posture Review that opens the door to deeper cuts and reduces the role of nuclear weapons. And we will call upon countries to begin negotiations in January on a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons.

The brevity of that paragraph belies the complexity of the issues he’s describing. We’re currently in negotiations with Russia regarding a new START treaty; there are also hopes that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will be brought before the US Senate this year. The future of a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty is more uncertain.

What has also currently been addressed by the traditional media, and what I’m going to discuss today, is the Nuclear Posture Review, or NPR. Simply put:

The NPR will establish U.S. nuclear deterrence policy, strategy, and force posture for the next five to 10 years…

The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have all attempted to tease details out of the White House and the Pentagon, with varying degrees of success.

What stands out in those articles is the apparent effort to shape a narrative that the White House and the Pentagon are in some sort of dire conflict regarding the NPR, when in fact the media are glossing over the details of what is actually a very complex interagency process, the details of which are not fully available to the public.

I wanted to go beyond the headlines and get a deeper understanding of the NPR issues under consideration, and what any sources of conflict might be. As a starting point, I followed up my August 2009 discussion with the president of the Ploughshares Fund, Joe Cirincione. I asked him if he thought the media characterization of a “debate” between the White House and the Pentagon was accurate. He reiterated what we talked about in August, namely that maintaining the nuclear status quo is ultimately a “pork” issue, if you will:

I wouldn’t say it’s between the White House and the Pentagon. I would say there is a struggle between the leaders in the administration and the nuclear weapons bureaucracy.

There are many people in the Department of Defense who agree with the President’s agenda and goals, who want to develop a nuclear strategy that makes sense for the twenty-first century, and that want to shift the focus from deterring the Soviet Union — effectively what we do now — to preventing nuclear terrorism and new nuclear states. There’s a lot of agreement between the Pentagon and the White House on those issues.

The problem comes, really, not from Secretary Gates, it’s from those people who have a vested career, financial, or political interest in keeping things exactly the way they are. That includes some of the people working in the US nuclear weapons laboratories. It includes some of the contractors who make a lot of money from nuclear weapons production and maintenance. It includes Senators whose states have nuclear weapons bases and labs. It includes conservative ideologues who want to portray the President as weak and argue that any change to the current Cold War strategy is risky.

All those forces are combining to resist change. In many ways, this is a very typical Washington struggle, similar to the struggle over health care, or energy, or even terrorism policy. That’s what’s going on now.

He emphasized that this is a work in progress:

The debate today over core nuclear policy issues is fierce and developing. It’s the next month or two that’s going to make all the difference. These decisions are being made right now, in the government. At the same time, there is a bipartisan consensus of military and national security experts that supports a new nuclear security agenda preventing nuclear terrorism, preventing new nuclear states, and reducing nuclear weapons toward zero. Anyone who supports this security agenda should get involved. These issues are very much in play, and now is the time for people to let their voices be heard…

… The top officials are in place, the support staff is starting to be in place, they’re finally fully engaging on the policy issues.

The Department of Defense has been involved in the Nuclear Posture Review for months, but up until October, almost all that discussion was about the nuclear weapons infrastructure: the jobs, the contracts, preservation of the base. Very little of it was on policy. The focus has shifted in the last few months to policy. Should that have been the starting point? Absolutely. But at least it’s being debated now. They’re trying to answer the fundamental question: what are nuclear weapons for? Up until now, most of what’s gone on has been about “how do we preserve the existing nuclear structure?” not “why do we have it?”

I also spoke with Daryl Kimball, the Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, who said the fact that the submission of the NPR to Congress has been delayed until March 1 is a good thing, because it means higher level officials (the White House and cabinet secretaries) are now focusing on the issues, and that it gives them more time to come to the important decisions they have to make. He told me that the primary issues are the following:

What is our declaratory policy, which is, in lay person’s terms, what is the answer to the question, what are US nuclear weapons for?

The second big question is, how many nuclear weapons are needed for those missions?

And then, how should US nuclear forces be structured? How many submarines, how many missiles, land, sea… [The nuclear triad.]

…the fourth issue is, so long as we have nuclear weapons, how do we maintain those that we have are safe, effective, reliable, and what kind of nuclear weapons maintenance infrastructure do you need to support the arsenal. This gets us into new warheads, or refurbished warheads [The question of "modernization"].

Then, the fifth issue… is how do the answers to those four questions affect our alliance commitments to NATO, to Japan, South Korea, both in terms of actual military terms and in terms of political optics and dynamics.

The sixth thing is how does all this affect our overall non-proliferation policy? Our overall goal here is to reduce the risk that nuclear weapons are used, or that they spread to additional countries or terrorist networks. So whatever we do in these other categories needs to support that overriding non-proliferation goal.

When I asked both Cirincione and Kimball about whether or not a delay in the NPR will affect negotiations on a new START treaty, they both told me “no”. This is because, as Kimball put it:

… just before the formal START follow-on negotiations began in [Spring 2009], the Obama administration identified those issues in the NPR that related to the START follow-on treaty. In other words, they reached preliminary decisions about what kind of cuts, what kinds of verification, etcetera, would be appropriate at this particular stage, and before the full NPR was completed.

Both of them also emphasized that if the NPR contains Obama’s stated goals, it will open the door to further deep reductions in our arsenal beyond what will be accomplished with the new START treaty.

It’s worth looking at the transcript of a talk that Kimball gave at a STRATCOM deterrence symposium last summer, if you want to know more specific recommendations regarding a reassessment of the role of nuclear weapons in our 21st century security policy. It’s detailed, but it basically comes down to this:

Cold War nuclear policy no longer fits the national security issues we’re facing in this modern world. As Secretary of State Clinton said in October 2009:

Clinging to nuclear weapons in excess of our security needs does not make the United States safer. And the nuclear status quo is neither desirable nor sustainable. It gives other countries the motivation or the excuse to pursue their own nuclear options…

…we must do more than reduce the numbers of our nuclear weapons. We must also reduce the role they play in our security. In this regard, the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review will be a key milestone. It will more accurately calibrate the role, size, and composition of our nuclear stockpile to the current and future international threat environments. And it will provide a fundamental reassessment of U.S. nuclear force posture, levels, and doctrine.

Or, as Joe Cirincione told me:

The review will reduce the role of nuclear weapons and open the door to further reductions, but by how much? Will the review tweak the current strategy or transform it? Are the supporters of the status quo going to prevail, or are the twenty-first century strategists going to win?

We know what the President wants. His cabinet members agree. Let’s hope that their policy triumphs, and we can move out of the 1980s and into the twenty-first century with our nuclear weapons policy.

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