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Many have tried to define a space weapon, myself included. None of us have come up with a satisfactory definition, which is one on many reasons why a treaty banning space weapons is not in the cards.

After the Bush administration disposed of the ABM Treaty, the Chinese and Russian governments dipped into the old Soviet playbook and tabled a draft “Treaty on the Prevention of the Deployment of Weapons in Outer Space.” Here’s their language defining space weapons:

The term ‘weapon in outer space’ means any device placed in outer space, based on any physical principle, which has been specially produced or converted to destroy, damage or disrupt the normal functioning of objects in outer space, on the Earth or in the Earth’s atmosphere, or to eliminate a population or components of the biosphere which are important to human existence or inflict damage on them;

A weapon shall be considered to have been ‘placed’ in outer space if it orbits the Earth at least once, or follows a section of such an orbit before leaving this orbit, or is permanently located somewhere in outer space.

Please note that this definition does not capture ground-based ASATs. The Russian and Chinese draft treaty is problematic in many other respects, as well. For example, unless there are common understandings on whether a multi-purpose device has been “specially produced or converted” so as to qualify as a space weapon, the proposed ban has no practical effect.

Philip Baines, a Canadian diplomat with uncommon technical expertise has proposed another definition of a space weapon:

a device based on any physical principle, specially designed or modified, to injure or to kill a person, irreparably damage or destroy an object, or render any place unusable.

In Phil’s view, form follows function. For example, “a satellite that is designed to be a weapon will also look like a weapon, and a satellite that is designed to be benign will look benign.” But satellite payload inspections, first proposed back in the Eisenhower administration, remain beyond the pale. And it may be far-fetched to assume common understandings on the form and function of non-inspected space-spaced objects. Nor can states rely on externally observable differences to distinguish satisfactorily between, say, a missile defense interceptor and a ground-based ASAT. As with the draft Russian and Chinese treaty text, Phil’s definition lends itself to disagreements over what “specially designed or modified” really means.

Theresa Hitchens, long a stalwart promoter of space security, now at UNIDIR, has defined space weapons this way:

destructive systems that operate in outer space after having been launched directly from Earth or parked in orbit.

Theresa’s definition has the benefit of concreteness, but it may still be too limiting: Is a “system” that doesn’t destroy a satellite but renders it nonfunctional a space weapon or not? And how do we deal with a device or weapon system with multiple potential purposes, such as an interceptor missile that can be used for ballistic missile defense as well as for ASAT purposes? An inclusive definition of a space weapon would foreclose essential military capabilities, while a limiting definition would allow many kinds of latent ASAT systems to run free.

In my view, we’re barking up the wrong tree in trying to define space weapons. How nations act in space matters far more than how they define space weapons. A treaty banning space weapons remains a distant goal. There are other ways, far more realizable, to strengthen norms for responsible space-faring nations – including the norm of not using satellites for target practice.

Over the past two decades, Iraq, Iran and Libya have tried to interfere with satellites. Is this a practice that responsible space-faring nations wish to emulate? The European Union has endorsed the Stimson Center’s proposed norm of “no harmful interference” against space objects. Yes, this invites a debate over the definition of “no harmful interference.” But reaching a reasonable conclusion on this subject is far easier than trying to define a space weapon.

The Obama administration has still not cleared its throat on this or related subjects. It took almost sixteen months for the Reagan administration to come up with a negotiating proposal for strategic arms reductions. It is taking even longer for Team Obama to propose a space diplomacy initiative.

Update | 11:27 am Jeffrey adds: Such definitional difficulties are precisely why I have argued for a “ban [on] the testing deployment and use of kinetic energy ASATs (KE ASAT ban), which destroy their target satellite by slamming into it, creating significant amounts of space debris.” I will be making the same pitch again in Geneva this month.

Comment [8]

We’d all be better off if Richard Betts wrote more often about proliferation. But he seems intent on pursuing high-quality, book-length projects on a wide range of topics, including surprise attack, war & peace, intelligence, and the Cold War.

My favorite Richard Betts article on proliferation appeared in Foreign Policy (Spring 1977) on paranoids, pygmies and pariahs, which he updated in a 1993 issue of Security Studies. Nations seek the Bomb, according to Richard, for two essential reasons: fear or ambition, or if you prefer, security or status.

Here’s a sampler:

Trying to coerce or buy off a power-happy state might well backfire; the desire for prestige is the desire not to be in a position of either victim or supplicant… Security-motivated candidates are the ones we should spend the most time worrying about. But here the problem is less what we can do than what we want to do.

There are no simple solutions that are feasible, no feasible solutions that are simple, and no solutions at all that are applicable across the board… There is no free lunch in nonproliferation policy; every effective measure has economic, political, or moral price tags.

Proliferation does not have a life of its own; it is a political problem as much as a technical one. Technological mystery, coinciding with international bipolarity, simply gave the United States a long period of grace in which it could afford to pay less attention to the political dimension.

With the disappearance of “technological mystery” and bipolarity, is there any wonder why new concerns about proliferation have arisen?

In a subsequent piece on proliferation (in Vic Utgoff, The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order, 2000), Richard labels proliferation optimists like Kenneth Waltz as “utopian realists” who argue that,

… nuclear weapons can produce the permanent peace that liberals have always believed in and realists have always said is impossible… Any theory that predicts, say, 90 percent of outcomes on some important matter is an amazingly good theory. The Waltz argument may be in that category… [but] one exception to the rule may be too many… The United States should act as if the utopian realists are wrong, but hope that they are right.

As for U.S. nonproliferation policy, Richard argues that,

For most of the nuclear era the priority that the United States placed on nonproliferation was high in principle but low in practice. Washington was always willing to promote nonproliferation when it did not have to short-change some other objective, but seldom did it prove willing to sacrifice other interests for the cause.

Comment

Greetings from Pakistan where, when it comes to nuclear strategy, people say little but act expeditiously. In India, on the other hand, people write much and act slowly.

India now has a coterie of first-rate thinkers on nuclear issues besides K. Subrahmanyam, including Raja Mohan, Rear Adm. (ret.) Raja Menon, Rajesh Basrur, Gurmeet Kanwal, and Bharat Karnad (who had a class with Bernard Brodie but thinks more like Herman Kahn).

In my view, one of the best and most overlooked Indian strategic analysts is Vice Adm. (ret.) Verghese Koithara. His book, Crafting Peace in Kashmir, Through a Realist Lens (2004), has a chapter on “Nuclear Danger” that is well worth reading. Here’s a sampler:

“Till it acquired nuclear weapons, Pakistan had been protecting its highly vulnerable nuclear facilities in Kahuta and elsewhere through conventional deterrence, not defence. Its high card had been the vulnerability of a big concentration of Indian nuclear assets, close to the economically central city of Mumbai, to Pakistan F-16s coming over the sea.”

“The requirement to keep warheads and delivery systems (and perhaps even the fissile and non-fissile sections of the warhead) separate for reasons of security and survival could add to design and maintenance problems relating to safety. The relatively small number (six at best) of explosive tests carried out by each country, and that too in a time-constrained manner, raises worries about design safety, as well.”

“As far as continuous real-time monitoring of the opponent’s nuclear delivery systems is concerned, both sides are effectively blind.”

“Pakistan’s strategy is aimed at deterring a conventional threat from India, while India’s is aimed at deterring a nuclear one from Pakistan. Since a conventional confrontation is easier to develop and must almost invariably precede a nuclear one, Pakistan’s deterrence has to function much more actively than India’s.”

“As the conventional military balance continues to shift in India’s favor, Pakistan’s reliance on its nuclear capability will increase and so will its effort to lower the nuclear threshold. Thus Pakistan’s strategy is likely to emphasize not just ‘first use’ but ‘early first use’ in the coming years.”

“Pakistan’s effort would be to maximize nuclear uncertainty in times of crisis while India’s would be to minimize it… Pakistan would like to establish that nuclear risk-taking and its consequences in South Asia resemble Russian roulette with the outcome relying on chance, while India would want to prove that it would resemble a game of chess with the outcome determined by rational logic and relative superiority.”

Verghese writes that further Indian nuclear testing of thermonuclear weapons would depend on confidence levels from prior tests. Indian strategic analysts are divided on whether such testing is necessary. Raja Mohan is satisfied with boosted fission-type yields; Bharat Karnad is not.

Comment [4]

Over the years, I’ve experienced great satisfaction watching former students, RAs, and interns sprout wings and assume responsible positions working on nuclear threat reduction. My career counseling often involves answering familiar questions, over and over again. I suspect some ACW readers about to enter the job market are asking the same questions: How do I get a job working at…? Or, how do I become a … ?

My advice, freely offered, is: Don’t make your job search harder than it needs to be. You’re putting too much pressure on yourself.

Instead, try to ask a different set of questions about the job market. What skills do you want to develop? Which opportunities will help you develop one or more of those skills? By opening the aperture and by focusing on skills rather than outcomes, more opportunities are likely present themselves.

Aspiring Wonks: Believe it or not, every job has some value when you are getting started. Your workplace will teach you what you are good at, and will help you hone these skills. Or it will teach you what want you don’t want to do or aren’t good at. Both kinds of learning experiences will help you on your way.

A few years ago, I wrote down some of my life lessons. Most of these axioms are about dealing with serious illness, but a few of them distilled what I’ve learned about the world of work. Here’s one:

The best careers are growth experiences, and growth usually starts with chores. As you grow further, you will discover what you are good at doing, and what you would prefer that others do. As your capabilities become more evident, you can slough off chores. Later on, you can choose to shed responsibilities that you can perform well, but not enjoyably, to focus on what you excel at and which makes your heart sing.

Put another way, as Mark Twain said, “Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

Comment [2]

After succeeding spectacularly by landing astronauts on the lunar surface and welcoming them home, what do you do for an encore? This question has vexed Washington ever since 1969. Subsequent national choices in the form of the space shuttle and the international space station absorbed large sums and turned out to be confining – not exactly what Americans expect or deserve from their space ventures. Next comes the long wait, until China produces similar headlines to the ones on yellowing newspapers that I treasure in my attic.

Momentum is to geopolitics as possession is to the law. A rare commodity for the United States at present, in space as on terra firma. It’s hard to pursue bold new visions when cleaning up big messes from the previous ones.

I’m eagerly anticipating John Logsdon’s book on JFK’s space policies. Here, for old times’ sake, are a few key passages from President Kennedy’s famous man on the moon speech before Congress, May 25, 1961:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish… In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the Moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there….

Let it be clear—and this is a judgment which the Members of the Congress must finally make—let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action—a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs… If we are to go only half way, of reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all.

One speech does not a space policy make. Kennedy’s encore (view it here), at Rice University on September 12, 1962, was perfectly pitched):

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people… But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? …

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… “

Fast forward to NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr., as reported by Space News, January 11, 2010:

We cannot do big things very much any more.

Comment [6]

Moritz Bleibtreu and Martina Gedeck as Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the 2009 film, The Baader Meinhof Complex.

Jeffrey’s posts and videos of the walkabout at the NATO nuclear weapon storage site in Belgium reminded me of a story with a much sharper edge that I retold in Better Safe than Sorry. ACW readers can file this one, along with last week’s account of the U.S. Navy’s encounter with the Foxtrot-class B-59 during the Cuban missile crisis, in the folder labeled “how-did-we-manage-(so-far)-to-avoid-an-epically-bad-headline?”

Politics were stretched to the breaking point in the late sixties and 1970s, when the culture wars took root in the United States, the Cultural Revolution crippled China, and disaffected middle class youth in West Germany gave terrorism a new face. They were called the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

In January 1977, gang members stormed a nuclear weapon storage facility in Giessen, West Germany. They planned to penetrate the base’s storage vaults by creating a diversion, blowing up a fuel tank outside the base perimeter. But they misread the fuel tank gauge, believing the tank to be almost full, when it was almost empty. Their shaped charge penetrated the tank above the fuel line, with no resulting special effects. Gang members then managed to penetrate the base perimeter, but after an exchange of gunfire, they were stopped short of the nuclear weapons storage area.

The base commander, then an Army Captain, told me this story. He later went on to become the Director of ACDA and helped jump start efforts to lock down dangerous weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union – Bill Burns.

Comment [6]

The Soviet Navy viewed nuclear-tipped torpedoes as aircraft carrier killers. A Soviet Foxtrot class diesel submarine, B-59, had this ace-in-the-hole when it was being depth-charged to the surface by the U.S. Navy during the Cuban missile crisis. Did Adm. George Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations (and the Navy’s version of Gen. Curtis LeMay) suspect that he was dealing with nuclear-armed submarines when his ships were aggressively enforcing the quarantine of Cuba? Wonks: Help me out here. There was much the U.S. intelligence community did not know during this crisis, including the presence of nuclear weapons in Cuba when the Kennedy administration was contemplating military options to take out missile sites. And no American official could possibly have known at that time that three officers on board the B-59 were conducting the most important vote in the history of the Nuclear Age, on whether to fire their nuclear-tipped torpedo or alternatively, so to speak, to go up with the ship.

We learned much later, after the Cold War was over, when Americans and Russians began to swap stories, that the Captain, Second Captain, and Deputy Political Officer on board the B-59 made a private compact over the possible use of their nuclear-tipped torpedo during the Cuban missile crisis. They were, of course, supposed to check back with Moscow before doing so, but it was hard for a diesel sub to call home while under attack. (For more on how the best laid plans for nuclear deterrence can go awry, Wonks-in-training can check out Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety.)

And so, on October 27, 1962, the same day that a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, the three officers voted. They promised each other that, in extremis, if they were unable to work through authorized channels, they would make their own decision about using their nuclear weapon. If all three voted in favor, they would do so. If the vote wasn’t unanimous, they would hold their fire. Two of the three officers voted to fire their torpedo. The third, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkipov, voted nay.

Arkipov should have been Time magazine’s Man of the Year, but Time’s editors, like the rest of us, were unaware of his remarkable contribution to Western civilization. Time voted for Pope John XXIII, instead. I’ve never seen a picture of Arkipov – maybe Jeffrey can find one for this post. He’s the unsung hero of the Cuban missile crisis.

Oral histories are only as reliable as the memories of story tellers. So if ACW readers have reason to believe these memories are deficient, please hold forth.

Comment [12]

A cunning rock ‘n roll showman, David Lee Roth, once opined that, “The key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Vice President Richard M. Nixon defended himself when he was struggling to stay on the ticket with Ike by calling attention to his family’s pet dog and his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat.” Those were the days when it was an article of faith for Republicans to equate security with solvency — sometimes unwisely. To maintain a balanced budget, Ike short-changed conventional forces and relied heavily on nuclear weapons for national security.

Times change. I remember wandering around D.C. during President Reagan’s inauguration week. My fellow citizens decided they had had enough of the Carter administration’s austerity and tentativeness. I felt stunned, not just by the loss of a job, but by the party goers’ ostentatious display of wealth. Washington was awash in mink coats and stretch limos. No apologies needed. Now the mink coats rarely come out of the closet, but the stretch limos have gotten longer. Both parties now thrive on the ostentatious display of wealth from their supporters while the country seeks deeper in debt.

My sense is that the Reagan years were a cultural as well as political watershed. One big shift, of course, related to the traditional Republican equation of solvency and security. The progressive tax code was bent to allow tax cuts for high-end incomes. Not surprisingly, commensurate cuts in government spending did not accompany losses in revenue. The Clinton administration accepted the thankless job of re-balancing the budget through revenue increases. A budget surplus resulted, and Democrats were then hammered as the Party of Taxation.

An old professor of mine, Robert W. Tucker, wrote:

The principal Reagan legacy in foreign policy may well be just this: that the nation’s 40th president transformed what had been a disposition not to pay for the American position in the world into something close to a fixed resolve not to do so.

The cultural aspects of the Reagan shift harkened back to the 1920s. A newspaperman who covered the Harding administration, Samuel Popkins Adams, wrote in Incredible Era, The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding, that “the country wanted an anti.” Harding was elected because he was so unlike his austere, demanding predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Harding arrived in Washington “with little more knowledge than the average man in the street of the issues on which the world’s future was to hang… He was an actor, cheerfully responsive to the direction of the playwrights.”

Reagan was, of course, a far more accomplished actor and politician than Harding. He surprised both his critics and supporters by reducing nuclear dangers in heroic and historic ways. Reagan flummoxed wonks by demonstrating that a grasp of detail mattered far less than having sound instincts. Garry Wills, in Reagan’s America, Innocents at Home, explained Reagan’s political success this way: “Because he acts himself, we know he is authentic.” Reagan was, in Wills’ view,

… the great American synecdoche… He is just as simple and just as mysterious, as our collective dreams and memories… He is the perfect carrier: the ancient messages travel through him without friction. No wonder he shows little wear and tear… Reagan does not argue for American values: he embodies them… We make the connections. It is our movie.

When politics becomes indistinct from stagecraft, masters of fiction can be our keenest observers. Here’s E.L. Doctorow on Reagan (in “The State of Mind of the Union,” The Nation, March 1986):

The new attitude [of the 1980s] borrows something of the accelerated sense of life in the 1920s, when precocity and a daring irrelevance caught up young people as the stock market had their fathers. But there is something unrecognizable here: it is not a spirit of selling out because it lacks that moral reference entirely; it is a kind of mutancy, I think, a structural flaw of the mind that suggests evolution in a social context.

The “evolution in a social context” of American politics continues apace. The George W. Bush administration fought two wars with tax cuts. It’s hard to be secure when you are insolvent. And now my fellow Americans have elected another “anti.” Think of this: Barack Obama could never have been elected President without George W. Bush.

Comment [12]

George Bunn (above, sailing and with son Matt) is one of the founding fathers of nuclear arms control. He was present at the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and served for eight years as ACDA’s first General Counsel. George participated in the negotiation of the Limited Test Ban and Nonproliferation treaties. Fortunately, he took notes during his years of public service, which is evident in Arms Control by Committee, Managing Negotiations with the Russians (1992). George wrote this book to add to the negotiating history of key accords and to suggest lessons learned, using the case study method.

In his chapter on the test ban, George reveals that ACDA Director William Foster exceeded his negotiating instructions trying to bridge differences on the number of on-site inspections required for a comprehensive treaty. The Politburo finally budged from zero to three OSIs per year; the Kennedy administration wanted seven inspections, but was prepared to fall back to six. Before throwing in the towel, George relates that Foster held up five fingers to his Soviet counterpart, who scowled. A CTBT wasn’t in the cards in 1962-3 for this and other reasons.

There is still along way to go before the CTBT enters into force, but as George wrote in The Status of Norms Against Nuclear Testing (The Nonproliferation Review, 1999), “there are norms operating against nuclear testing even though the CTBT has not been ratified.” Norm building is a poorly analyzed, alchemical process in which political activism, risk-taking leadership, resolute negotiators, and “mere words” combine to eventually gain the status of customary and then international law. All of the key bulwarks of arms control — the tradition of non-battlefield use of nuclear weapons, the global nonproliferation regime, and constraints on nuclear testing – began as outlandish notions that have become norms. Norms can be broken, of course. So, too, can traffic laws. But we would be much less safe without them.

Without rules, there are no rule breakers. Norms, George wrote, “are international prescriptions for state conduct. They are principles, standards or rules.” Or as Abe and Antonia Chayes put it, “They are prescriptions for action in situations of choice, carrying a sense of obligation, a sense that ought to be followed.” The states of greatest proliferation concern are outliers, rejecting a widely shared sense of obligation. Norms clarify their outlier status, as well as the steps required for their rehabilitation.

Norm building was George Bunn’s life work. His handiwork now constrains political choices, and helps promote personal, national, and international security.

Comment [6]

Ronald Reagan remains a mystery. During his first term, he was vilified by the Left. During his second term, when he sided with the deal makers around him and when hard liners began to take their leave, Reagan was slammed from the Right. An accomplished biographer, Edmund Morris, was given extraordinary access to write an account of the man and his presidency. He was so unable to gain a fix on his subject that his botched result, Dutch, was partly fictionalized.

Historians will have a difficult time to settle their accounts of the Reagan presidency. His record of accomplishment on nuclear issues should speak for itself, but what role the President played in this drama is hard to pin down. The first chapter of this history, written primarily by U.S. journalists, wasn’t kind to Reagan, picturing him as woefully deficient on substance and easily manipulated by those around him. These accounts gave most of the credit for the breakthroughs reached during his presidency to Mikhail Gorbachev and to George Shultz and Paul Nitze. A second wave of accounts, relying more on declassified documents and Reagan’s diary, picture the President in command of the momentous developments that occurred on his watch. Perhaps a third wave of historical accounts will depict Reagan somewhere in between.

For those with short memories, here’s a sampler of some of the flak President Reagan took:

[Reagan is] a man singularly endowed with an ability to hold contradictory views without discomfort.

— Reagan’s ACDA Director Kenneth Adelman

Formidable will, based on a mediocre understanding of the facts. As often in politics, ignorance sustains.

— Jacques Attali

Ronald Reagan, who taught us to distrust summitry, to disbelieve in treaties, to reflect always on the duplicity of our communist enemy, is investing his historic reputation and our security in arms control treaties co-signed by communists. The Great Communicator who preached Peace through Strength today preaches peace through parchment.

— Pat Buchanan

[He] let his name and his office be traded about by subordinates in an endless civil war within the executive branch.”

— McGeorge Bundy

To me, the White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm?

— Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig

What’s going on right now is that the crazier analysts have risen to higher positions than is normally the case. They are able to carry their ideas further and higher because the people at the top are simply less well-informed than is normally the case.”

— Herbert York

What do you do when your president ignores all the relevant facts and wanders in circles?

— Reagan’s OMB Director David Stockman

[Reagan is] a President who confused nostrums with policies and dreams with strategy.

— Strobe Talbott

In relations with the Russians, the Reagan administration most resembles March: in like a lion, out like a lamb.

— Reagan’s ACDA Director Kenneth Adelman

Many other quotes could be added to this list. Feel free to add – especially one by President Reagan’s former speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, which I vaguely recall but can’t find in my shoe boxes.

Comment [26]