ArmsControlWonk.com

Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) gave an outstanding talk to a roundtable I co-hosted this morning at the Center for American Progress, my home institution, to mark the release of a study by Joe Cirincione and me, Orienting the 2009 Nuclear Posture Review: A Roadmap. Congresswoman Tauscher, who chairs the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, was the driving force behind the requirement in the FY 2008 Defense Authorization Bill that the next administration undertake a formal nuclear posture review (NPR).

Our study makes the case for why a successful NPR should be among the Obama administration’s top priorities. I suspect this is an easy case to make to most Wonk readers.

But the study also provides a roadmap on how to structure and manage the review so that it achieves key policy objectives. The roadmap is based on lessons learned from the Clinton and Bush administration NPRs, along with some two dozen interviews and informal discussions with experts, congressional staff, and former senior officials with experience in nuclear policy from both sides of the political spectrum.

This is our basic argument:

The goals of the 2009–2010 NPR should be to recalibrate America’s nuclear deterrent in light of existing and emerging threats, strengthen America’s hand in negotiations on improvements to the global nuclear nonproliferation regime, and send a clear signal to the world that the United States is charting a new, multilateral course. Success in achieving these goals hinges on development of a coherent, realistic strategy for conducting the review that ensures senior appointees devote sustained attention even as they confront other national security challenges. The strategy should be organized according to these principles:

• Do not politicize nuclear weapons doctrine.
• Conduct the review as a strategy-driven exercise guided by a vision for nuclear weapons policy elaborated by the president.
• Consult and engage the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• Consult and engage Congress.
• Appoint experienced professionals to carry out the vision.
• Ensure that the review is interagency.
• Consult and engage key allies and partners.

And here are some of the highlights from Congresswoman Tauscher’s remarks:

The new NPR should recommend ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Fifteen years of science-based stockpile stewardship programs have made it possible for the United States to use our brain power and scientific tools, rather than testing in the Nevada desert to ensure the reliability of our nuclear deterrent.

No other single action could send a clearer signal to the rest of the world that the United States is committed to controlling the spread of nuclear weapons and materials.

Too often we are presented with a false choice. Either maintaining an unnecessarily high level of nuclear weapons as a hedge against uncertainty which I believe would undermine our efforts to reduce global nuclear risks or allowing our arsenal to rust and corrode away.

Neither is acceptable.

From 1994 to 2004, we had a law on the books called “Spratt-Furse” that prohibited research and development of so-called mini-nukes. It was important because of the signal it sent to the world that the United States was not looking for new applications for nuclear weapons.

As we embark into the next phase of stockpile stewardship, we should renew the Spratt-Furse law, so our intentions are clear.

Comment [5]

Ok, I am back. Let’s all have an electronic round of applause for Anya, Bob and Andreas — three fine guest bloggers.

Last night I was flipping through my copy of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In the correspondence section, there were a few letters about The ever-ready nuclear missileer by Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger (64:3, July/August 2008, pp. 14-21).

One letter that wasn’t published due to length (for complicated reasons relating to the Bulletin‘s shift to an all-digital format) is a detailed commentary by Bruce Blair. Instead, I am pleased to post it on Arms Control Wonk.com:

Letter to the Editor

I thoroughly enjoyed and admire the nostalgia-inducing article on nuclear missileers by Hodge and Wienberger. It deftly captures the attitudes and mores of the launch crews, as well as the atmosphere and practical side of their alert duty. It illuminates the core unresolved issue of their post-Cold War mission – what is the meaning of nuclear deterrence in the absence of enemies other than terrorist groups? It is generally accurate and quite insightful on many levels. The article fumbled some key details, however, some of which are important to get straight.

The assertion that missileers can only launch their missiles after
receiving codes that come directly from the president is not correct. The codes in question are not held by the president, but rather by various command elements of the U.S. military. All of the codes used to authenticate launch orders and unlock missiles for firing are strictly held in military hands. They are widely dispersed among commanders to ensure that attacks on high-level command centers could not ‘decapitate’ the authorization process. Such decapitation fears in the past led the Strategic Command to secretly circumvent the coding system mentioned in the article, unbeknownst to the Pentagon and White House.

The president possesses codes that are neither necessary nor sufficient to physically enable strategic missiles for launch. All this together with a long history of presidential pre-delegation of launch authority down the military chain of command raises some vexing questions about the true origin and lawfulness of a launch command. Although as the article intimates the issue rarely haunts the minds of firing crews, at least one courageous and conscientious missileer has ended his career by raising this issue. Throughout and after the cold war StratCom managed to keep this issue well hidden under the rug and to suppress the inconvenient truth that in many wartime scenarios a military commander instead of the president or his/her legal successors might have been the source of a lawful-appearing launch order.

The article’s discussion of launch ‘voting’ in which four people in two separate capsules are allegedly required to initiate a missile launch omits the exceptions to this rule. Everything in the nuclear world does not go in pairs, contrary to the article’s characterization. In reality, a single ‘vote’ issued by a single two-person launch crew in a single capsule will do the trick in some circumstances. As many as all fifty missiles in the squadron’s field can be launched this way if one capsule is the sole survivor of an attack, or if other factors cause launch crews in other capsules to take no action to inhibit a single-vote launch. Without straining credulity too much, suffice it to say that a variety of these factors exists, ranging from human error to confusion to negligence to terrorist sabotage. Uncertainty over the validity of a launch order may generate such unusual voting results. ‘Napping’ crew members with alarm circuit breakers pulled to enhance their rest could also generate such strange voting scenarios. By the way, it’s not rare for the missileer keeping watch while the other naps to fall asleep too. The prudence of allowing napping at all escapes me, since it technically violates the fundamental safety canon of nuclear weapons operations – the 2-person rule that normally requires two competent and watchful individuals working in tandem in sensitive positions. Tolerating an exception for duty launch crews for economic reasons is dubious judgment.

On a lighter side, the article understandably slid past the rich and sometimes somewhat twisted sub-culture of missileer society. Declaring as fantasy the idea of officers casually tossing the launch keys to the incoming shift, or as pure Hollywood the image of an officer on duty pulling a gun out as happened in the movie WarGames, the article’s authors just didn’t hang out long enough to hear the tales and the truth of life underground. Is it impossible to believe that an outgoing shift purloined the launch authorization codes and sent them back down to the duty crew under the hot plate covers of their dinner? As for the guns, while they no longer are carried by the duty officers as the article notes, they were indeed worn at the time of the movie’s release. The practice of arming the duty officers ended a few years later (late 1980s) after a curious launch officer accidentally discharged his firearm while on duty, and his duty squadron up to the level of squadron commander tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to cover up the incident. The cover-up happened at the same Wyoming missile base the authors visited.

Bruce Blair
Washington, D.C.

Comment [6]

No Wonk’s virtual bookshelf would be complete without an electronic copy of the following historical study of nuclear weapons in Third World-conflicts and crises (23 megabyte PDF):

William Yengst, Stephen Lukasik and Mark Jensen, Nuclear Weapons that Went to War (NWTWTW), DNA-TR-96-25, draft final report sponsored by the U.S. Defense Special Weapons Agency and Science Applications International Corp., October 1996, unclassified.

Before continuing, I want to thank Mr. Yengst (of SAIC) and Dr. Lukasik (the former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, under whose tenure ARPANET began) for permitting me to post a copy of NWTWTW.

Sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Special Weapons Agency (which was incorporated into the new Defense Threat Reduction Agency in 1998) and Science Applications International Corporation, Nuclear Weapons that Went to War uses exclusively public-source information to examine the impact of nuclear weapons in an array of crisis and conflict situations in the Third World. In particular, it devotes sixteen chapters to careful-yet-consciously-tentative studies of the following cases:

• Application of Nuclear Weapons Against Japan (1945)
• Nuclear Weapons for the Korean War (1950-1953)
• Nuclear Weapons for Dien Bien Phu (1954)
• Suez: Nuclear Threat after a Lightning War (1956)
• Lebanon: Acting from a Position of Strength (1958)
• The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
• Nuclear Weapons and the Assault on the Liberty (1967)
• The Capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo (1968)
• Nuclear Weapons for the Battle of Khe Sanh (1968)
• Sino-Soviet Border Dispute Initiates a Nuclear Threat (1969)
• Israeli Nuclear Weapons and the 1973 “October War”
• South African Nuclear Weapons to Deter Communist Angola (1984)
• Soviet Nuclear Weapons Deployment in Afghanistan (1979-1987)
• Nuclear Weapons in the Falkland Islands (1982)
• Nuclear Weapon Considerations during Desert Storm (1991)

• Taiwan Dilemma (1958, 1996)

In NWTWTW‘s preface, Yengst et al. write that their study provides:

• Evidence of conditions under which nuclear weapons were seriously considered for use.
• Cases in which improvements can (or should) be made in weapon planning, operations, and security.
• Descriptions of political, military, and public reactions that resulted when use of nuclear weapons was imminent.

• A basis for war games situations in which new weapons, strategies, and tactics can be evaluated.

They continue:

Several ground rules were observed in preparing this report. First, it does not address the Cold War competition between the U.S. and USSR. Second, it covers all U.S. and foreign crises and conflicts that could be found in which nuclear weapons were considered for use or mistakenly brought into combat. Third, it is based entirely on data and information from unclassified sources. Although classified sources could provide greater insight into the details and add credibility to each event, the report will have wider distribution and utility as an unclassified document. Fourth, each historical event is presented as a stand-alone situation in which three elements are addressed:

• Description of the situation, its background and resolution.
• The role of nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

• Lessons learned from the crisis or conflict.

To insure that the material of this report is credible and clearly presented, it has been submitted to a team of senior military and political experts for review and refinement before publication. However, the research was not exhaustive and future readers may be able to contribute further insights into the studies (italics added).

So, what say you, Readers of the Wonk? What further insights into these case studies can you contribute?

P.S. Yengst and Lukasik have put together a 2007 update and commentary to NWTWTW; I’ll post a link to that in this entry at a later time.

Comment [12]

Greetings, Readers of the Wonk. My name is Robert Zarate, and I’m a research fellow at the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C. I’ll be guest-blogging this week, but before getting started, I wanted first to thank Jeffrey Lewis for the kind offer—and the wonderful opportunity—to do this.

To kick things off, I thought I’d write about something that dovetails with one of Anya Loukianova’s posts from last week, and share with all y’all a recent essay that I wrote for NPEC on the future of Megatons to Megawatts (M2M) in the wake of the so-called Domenici Amendment, a recent law sponsored by Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) that creates new commercial incentives for Russia to keep blending down high enriched uranium (HEU) after 2013:

Robert Zarate, How Much More Bomb Uranium Will Russia Blend Down? Washington, D.C.: NPEC, October 31, 2008.

Quick Background on Megatons to Megawatts

To recap, Megatons to Megawatts is a Russo-American arms control program to demilitarize bomb-grade uranium—taken from dismantled Soviet-era nuclear warheads—for use in civil nuclear commerce. Under the so-called HEU Agreement, the bilateral 1993 pact that created M2M’s basic framework, Russia agreed over a 20-year period to blend down 500 metric tons of Russian bomb-grade uranium; and the United States, correspondingly, to facilitate the sale of the resulting downblended low enriched uranium (LEU) to U.S. nuclear utilities.

It is important to note that Russian LEU imports outside of the Megatons to Megawatts framework are strictly limited under the terms of a 1992 accord (known as the Russian Suspension Agreement, or RSA) in which Russia agreed to halt practically all uranium sales to U.S. nuclear utilities in return for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s suspension of an antidumping investigation on Russian uranium sales. The worry (then and now) was that Russia—which would end up inheriting some 80 percent of the USSR’s massive government-built and government-financed nuclear complex—could sell LEU and other uranium goods at below fair-market value prices, and fatally undercut America’s still-fledgling civil uranium enrichment sector.

Under Megatons to Megawatts, Russia so far has blended down some 345 metric tons of HEU, equivalent at least to 13,800 nuclear warheads, if one assumes—as the International Atomic Energy Agency does—25 kilograms of HEU per warhead. (However, as the NRDC’s Tom Cochran and Christopher Paine have argued, the assumption of 25 kilograms of HEU per warhead is high and conservative; some experts have told me that, for U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads, a more reasonable assumption might be, say, 12 kilograms.) The U.S. Department of Energy reports that the resulting downblended Russian LEU from Megatons to Megawatts accounts for “nearly half” — yes, folks, “nearly half” — of the nuclear fuel now annually consumed by America’s civil nuclear power reactors.

By the start of 2014, when the current HEU Agreement is set expire, Russia will have earned as much as US$12 billion from Megatons to Megawatts. Moscow, however, appears (at this point) not all that keen to agree to a new, post-2013 HEU downblending pact. But this is where Senator Domenici’s new law comes in . . . .

After the Domenici Amendment: Will Russia Keep Blending Down HEU?

Having watched from afar the development of the Domenici Amendment over the last few months, I must say how truly remarkable it is that it was even passed into law this year. Suffice to say, his staff pulled one heckuva proverbial “Hail Mary” pass to get this bill onto H.R. 2638, a so-called continuing resolution to sustain certain Federal appropriations until March 2009, that passed the Congress in late September.

The Domenici Amendment not only affirms the terms of an existing bilateral accord (known as the 2008 Amendment to the Russian Suspension Agreement) that will allow normal Russian LEU exports to make up as much as 20 percent of America’s post-2013 uranium market, but also promises to increase this market access up to 25 percent if Russia agrees to blend down an additional 300 metric tons of HEU. [The Amendment also creates a new and independent legal basis for the U.S. Commerce Department to enforce limits on Russian LEU imports, with the effect of specifically shielding Russian LEU import limits from any impact that the U.S. Supreme Court’s forthcoming decisions on USEC v. Eurodif and U.S. v. Eurodif might have had. — Added on 11/05/2008 @ 7:57 am.]

In addition, and in contrast to the 1993 HEU Agreement, the Domenici Amendment neither expressly calls for Russia to sell its downblended LEU exclusively to U.S. nuclear utilities (i.e., the Russians would be free to sell downblended uranium globally or to use it domestically), nor explicitly requires downblended Russian LEU to conform to the stringent isotopic standards for nuclear fuel set by ASTM International, formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials.

Will all the above incentives be enough to persuade Russia to blend down more bomb-grade uranium? As my essay discusses, it is not yet clear what effect the Domenici Amendment’s new commercial incentives will have on the possibility of post-2013 Russian HEU downblending. (If you have access to Platts publications, check out Daniel Horner’s very recent article on this question: Horner, “Russian Downblending of HEU after 2013 Unlikely, Some Say,” NuclearFuel, Vol. 33, No. 22, November 3, 2008, pp. 6-7. See also Matthew Bunn’s July 2008 essay, Expanded and Accelerated HEU Downblending: Designing Options to Serve the Interests of All Parties.)

Nonetheless, given that Russia will have an estimated 770 metric tons of bomb-grade uranium— and the United States, an estimated 675 metric tons —after the current HEU Agreement expires, you can expect to hear much more about these bilateral civil and military uranium issues in the years to come.

For more on these issues, check out my NPEC essay.

Comment

A fire broke out in a Minuteman III silo in Wyoming and burned undetected for five days.

Tom Roeder from the Colorado Springs Gazette has the story. The use of duct tape is my favorite detail:

The fire was May 23 at a silo 42 miles east of Cheyenne, Wyo,, where the Minuteman III missile is stored, ready for firing in an unmanned, underground launch facility. The command said it waited for the investigation to be completed before releasing a report.

An Air Force Space Command spokeswoman said the fire, caused by a faulty battery charger in a storage room, extinguished itself from a lack of fuel and was discovered later by repair crews looking for wiring problems on the cables connected to the missile.

[snip]

Problems revealed by the investigation include unclear instructions on the installation of parts for the battery charger, quality assurance issues and the use of duct tape on cables, the command said.

[snip]

The blaze was not discovered immediately because launch crews monitor the silos remotely from control facilities miles from the missiles. The crews did get warning alarms for an electrical problem and excessive heat.

Space Command said the fire never reached the missile launch tube and was limited to the equipment room, meaning the booster and warhead were never in jeopardy.

I am starting to sound like a broken record (once, twice, thrice):

This is not an isolated incident. The organization has a problem. This is dangerous.

Comment [4]

Congress has mandated that the next administration complete a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) by early 2010. Senators McCain and Obama have both indicated support for nuclear reductions consistent with sustaining deterrence, and there is growing bipartisan support for a serious reexamination of U.S. nuclear weapons policy along these lines.

But many conservatives are not on board. The George C. Marshall Policy Institute just released the transcript of a recent talk on nuclear weapons policy by Senator Jon Kyl, a staunch conservative and the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate. The Arizona senator’s remarks provide a good window into the five main rhetorical strategies and arguments that hardliner conservatives are likely deploy in the 2009-2010 debate over the NPR and NPT Review Conference.

Discredit calls for nuclear reductions by associating them with unilateral nuclear disarmament. In his remarks, Senator Kyl immediately pivots from noting the bipartisan call for nuclear reductions by secretaries Perry, Shultz, Kissinger and Senator Nunn in the now-famous WSJ op-eds to castigating a so-called “nuclear freeze” movement that supposedly recommends a course where “the U.S. alone is disarmed.” Actually, the main message of the nuclear freeze movement (which was active in the 1980s) was (take a wild guess) to freeze nuclear arsenals, i.e. stop building new nukes, and not unilateral disarmament. More fundamentally, Senator Kyl is arguing against a straw man: there is not a single serious U.S. leader or respected expert from either side of the political spectrum advocating for unilateral disarmament.

Mischaracterize the primary diplomatic objective of nuclear reductions as seeking to influence Iran and North Korea. Senator Kyl ridicules the notion that nuclear reductions by the United States would have any impact on the nuclear ambitions of rogue states, saying “of course” they would not. But convincing Iran and North Korea to forgo nuclear weapons is not the animating diplomatic goal of nuclear reductions. Rather, it is to address concerns among non-aligned countries that the United States is not living up to to its NPT Article VI nuclear disarmament obligations. “By fulfilling our commitment to make progress toward nuclear disarmament,” concludes a policy task force co-chaired by former secretaries Perry and Albright, “we give ourselves much greater leverage to persuade other countries to take the firm steps we consider necessary to prevent terrorists and additional countries from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

Suggest that America is getting left behind in a new arms race. Senator Kyl laments that “other states are modernizing their nuclear weapons and the United States is not.” Actually, these states are mostly playing catch-up—and they have a long way to go. Russia, for instance, keeps most of its SSBN fleet in port, where they are sitting ducks. Moreover, the United States is modernizing its strategic arsenal, for example, by deploying the more accurate Trident II D-5 missile to the SSBN fleet, improving the avionics on B-2 bombers so they can fly under radar, and putting the high-yield warheads and advanced reentry vehicles from dismantled MX missiles on Minuteman ICBMs while improving Minuteman’s guidance system. In any event, America’s existing nuclear arsenal—to say nothing of its overwhelming conventional superiority—is more than sufficient to deter Russia (let alone China or Iran) and reassure U.S. allies that America remains committed to their security.

Selectively interpret technical data on warhead reliability. Senator Kyl chides Congress for not funding the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), suggesting that “each time we discover a problem in our legacy weapons…we have changed the weapon beyond its original design, in many cases because the components aren’t even available any more, they are so old-fashioned.” One gets the impression that our nukes are junkers patched together with duct tape and chewing gum. Yet each year since 1997, the secretaries of defense and energy have certified the arsenal as safe and reliable. As to a possible future need for an RRW or a new facility for manufacturing large numbers of plutonium pits, there is no need to commit now: an NNSA study found that the majority of plutonium pits for most nuclear weapons have minimum lifetimes of at least 85 years, roughly twice as long as originally expected.

Offer optimistic cost projections for new nuclear weapons facilities. Senator Kyl suggests that “with as little as $300 million we could begin the construction of facilities like the Chemistry and Metallurgy Facility Replacement Project (CMRR).” What is important to recognize, however, is that this is merely a down payment on a $2 billion project. Moreover, completing this facility will cost at least 2-3 times as much as DOE originally promised, according to DOE’s FY 2009 budget request:

The CMRR CD-1 was approved on June 17, 2005 with a preliminary cost range of $745,000,000 – $975,000,000.

[snip]

Based on continued examination of the project and recent, industry-wide experience related to the increases in the cost of construction of comparable facilities, the estimate for construction of the Nuclear Facility at CMRR is now viewed to be significantly higher. Initial estimates place the revised TPC above $2,000,000,000.

Who’s to say costs won’t escalate further?

Let’s be clear: for long as the United States possesses nuclear weapons, it must continue to maintain an appropriate nuclear weapons complex to ensure that the arsenal is safe and reliable. But meeting this need does not require American taxpayers to write DOE a blank check for constructing large new nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities decades before they might possibly be needed.

Comment [13]

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Elaine Grossman had an excellent story on the B61 Mod 12 LEP. Elaine reported that NNSA was considering either increasing the size of the B61 or reducing the explosive yield to create “real estate” for new new safety and security features:

However, if the Pentagon could either increase the size of a given weapon system or reduce its explosive yield, additional safety and security features imagined for the replacement warhead might instead be incorporated into existing hardware as it is overhauled, the Air Force official said.

I’ve now been told that NNSA is considering precisely those two options: either to build a device that would require a physically larger casing or reducing the yield.

The policy question is whether Congress ought to view reducing yield as a “new” weapon that does not conform to the military characteristics of the existing stockpile. On the one hand, reducing yield would ceteris paribus reduce capability. But other things are seldom equal. The B61 Mod 12 will likely have all sorts of new components outside of the nuclear explosives package (fuses, spin rocket motors and the like) that will more than offset any loss in yield.

As yield declines, NNSA opens the US up to claims that it is pursuing “mini-nukes” and other “more usable” nuclear weapons that would lower the threshold for nuclear war. That’s a concern in this case because the lowest yield setting of the existing B61 tactical variants is in sub-kiloton territory. The B61 is said to have a variable yield between .3 kt (300 tons, most likely the yield of the unboosted fission primary) and a few hundred kilotons.

One option is, presumably, to re-use the W84 pits that are sitting in the strategic reserve and have a mechanical safing device. (Both the W84 and W85 were derived from the B61 3/4 and the B61 Mod 10 was made, in turn, from reused W85 pits.) The W84 has a minimum yield of 200 tons (.2 kt).

Mod	Entered Stockpile	Comment
0	1969	No command or enhanced electrical safety, strategic bomb all converted to Mods 6 and 9 by October 1992
1	1971	Strategic bomb; replaced MK 28; all converted to Mod 7 by Oct 1992
2	1975	Inertial command disable; tactical bomb; 10-345 KT yield; no IHE; converted to Mod 8
3	1979	In stockpile, includes IHE, command disable, weak link/strong link signal generator; tactical bomb replacing MKs 28, 43, 57
4	1979	Same as Mod 3
5	1977	Nonviolent command command disable, weak link/strong link signal generator; tactical bomb replacing MKs 28, 57; 10-345 KT yield; no IHE; all converted to Mod 8 by June 1993
6	canceled	Upgraded B61-0; new PAL and IHE; IOC was to have been March 1991; included ENDS; cancelled Feb 1992
7	1985	Modified B61-1, in stockpile. Includes new PAL, IHE, backup fuzing, command disablement. High yield strategic SAC bomb replaced MK 28FI. Some Mod 7s were converted to EPWs.
8	canceled	Upgraded Mod 0; IOC was March 1991; included IHE, ENDS; canceled Feb 1992
9	canceled	Tactical bomb; Mod 0 conversion; included IHE and ENDS; canceled September 1991
10	1990	Yield between those of Mods 3 and 4 (0.3-80 KT); modified W-85 warhead in B61-4; in stockpile. uses IHE and ENDS
11	1996	EPW with a single yield in the hundreds of kilotons

Source: Comments, with the exception of the B61-11 are from Chuck Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, vol VI, Table 4-27. I am not 100 percent on the stockpile entry dates, but they should be within a year or so.

It would seem to me that there is no inherent problem with the idea of reducing yield, provided that the rationale is to create “real estate” for new security or reliability measures. In fact, that was precisely an exception outlined in the final Spratt-Furse language that prohibited the research and development of mini-nukes from 1994-2004:

Nothing in this section shall prohibit the Secretary of Energy from conducting, or providing for the conduct of, research and development necessary … (2) to modify an existing weapon for the purpose of addressing safety and reliability concerns …

It would seem to me that if Congress wanted to LEP the B61 at a reduced yield, while protecting our nonproliferation interests, they could fund the B61 Mod 12 LEP and reinstate Spratt-Furse.

Comment [5]

A fellow UMD alum reminds me that Mac Destler — a member of my dissertation committee — wrote a wonderful summary of the test ban fiasco in a book chapter entitlted The Reasonable Public and the Polarized Policy Process.

I am always amazed how effortlessly Mac writes about arcane subjects that deaden the prose of less gifted scholars (like me, for instance):

Test Ban Fiasco

The CTBT was the international issue where partisan conflict surfaced in rawest form. Substantively, the treaty was a centerpiece in the administration’s policy against proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the president personally signed it in 1996, making the United States the first country to do so. More than 150 other countries followed (though only about one-third had ratified it by fall 1999). It was sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997, where Chairman Jesse Helms bottled it up, refusing to hold hearings until the administration submitted and the full Senate voted on (and presumably rejected) amendments to the ABM Treaty negotiated in 1997 and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The CTBT was also viewed with skepticism, however, by former officials in Republican administrations not associated with the far right—Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, for example.

The United States had not conducted nuclear tests since 1992, and in mid-1999 the administration was pressing India to sign and preparing for a special international conference on the treaty in early October. To the White House and the State Department, ratification was overwhelmingly in the U.S. interest. But Republicans controlled the Senate 55–45; to have any chance at all of winning the 67 votes required, Clinton would need the support of Republican centrists like Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, senior Foreign Relations member Richard Lugar, and rising internationalist Chuck Hagel—and the cooperation, at the very least, of Majority Leader Trent Lott. Rather than undertake the hard, slogging work of building a bipartisan majority, however, the president worked with Senate Democrats in a public campaign to embarrass and put heat on the Senate Republicans, to make the issue a political winner if not a legislative winner. On July 20, Clinton called for Foreign Relations Commitee hearings in a Rose Garden statement, while Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) released a letter on the same day urging such hearings signed by all forty-five Senate Democrats. Dorgan also released a poll, conducted jointly by a Democratic and a Republican polling firm, which found 82 percent of Americans (84 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Republicans) believing that the United States should ratify the CTBT.²⁰

Senator Dorgan upped the ante on September 8, telling his colleagues that until Lott allowed consideration of the CTBT, “I intend to plant myself on the floor like a potted plant” and block any routine business. Other Democrats joined in, including ranking Foreign Relations Democrat Joseph Biden, and explained their strategy two weeks later to presidential national security adviser Samuel Berger. Unknown to them, however, hard-line Senate treaty opponent John Kyl had been working quietly with Helms for months to solidify Republican votes against the CTBT, and had commitments from well over the necessary thirty-four. Lott then called the Democrats’ bluff. He reversed himself on September 30 and offered to take up the treaty, with a vote in two weeks. Democrats, thinking they had a shot at persuading enough Republicans, quickly agreed.²¹ They learned within a week that they had no chance of winning, and suddenly became alarmed about the global impact of a Senate rejection. (The Senate had not voted down an important treaty since the Treaty of Versailles in 1920.)

By early October the White House and Minority Leader Tom Daschle had taken an 180-degree turn and were negotiating with Lott to avoid having a vote. Sixty-two senators, including twenty-four Republicans, signed a letter initiated by Warner and Democrat Pat Moynihan urging that the matter be put off until 2001, and the president formally requested to Lott that he “postpone consideration.” But this now required either unanimous consent in the Senate or an extraordinary procedural vote. Hard-line Republicans, wanting to sink the treaty once and for all, blocked the first way out. Lott was unwilling to call for, or acquiesce in, the second. So on October 13, the Senate voted 48–51 against ratifying the treaty, with only 4 Republicans in favor.²² “Never before,” declared the president, “has a serious treaty involving nuclear weapons been handled in such a reckless and ultimately partisan way.” He did not state that his own party bore its full share of the blame.²³ Nor did his national security adviser help matters when he gave an impassioned speech eight days later attacking “the isolationist right in the Congress” for the treaty’s defeat.²⁴

20. Craig Cerniello, “White House, Key Senators Intensify Push for CTBT,” Arms Control Today, July–August 1999.

21. John M. Broder, “The Tactics: Quietly, Dextrously, Senate Republicans Set a Trap,” New York Times, October 14, 1999.

22. Eric Schmitt, “Senate Kills Test Ban Treaty in Crushing Loss for Clinton,” New York Times, October 14, 1999.

23. Dave Boyer, “Senate Rejects Treaty on Nuke Testing,” The Washington Times, October 14, 1999.

24. Samuel R. Berger, “American Power: Hegemony, Isolationism, or Engagement,” Address to Council on Foreign Relations, October 21, 1999 (available on White House website). The assistant also attacked the “new isolationists” for “devastating cuts to our foreign affairs budget.”

McCain didn’t cover himself in glory during the lead up to the vote, but nor would it be correct to paint him as a great villain in the drama. McCain, for example, was among the 62 Senators who signed the Moynihan-Warner letter seeking a delay in the vote.

Comment [2]

Elaine Grossman recently wrote pair of excellent stories on how NNSA is modifying the existing LEP programs for the B61 and the W76 in order to achieve some of the benefits of the RRW program:

— U.S. Air Force Might Modify Nuclear Bomb, Global Security Newswire, September 26, 2008.

— Military’s RRW Alternative Is Warhead Life Extension, Global Security Newswire, September 12, 2008.

Comment [7]

How’s this for irony: the bureaucratic home of nuclear weapons policy at DOD is SO/LIC&IC, short for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict & Interdependent Capabilities.

Kidding aside, this actually says a lot about the diminishing bureaucratic footprint of nuclear weapons policy. During the 1993-1994 NPR, for example, the career nuclear weapons bureaucracy, civilian and military, was an independent force to be reckoned with, as Janne Nolan documented in her definitive account of that NPR, Elusive Consensus: Nuclear Weapons and American Security After the Cold War.

And it surely is still a force, but just how much is open to debate. The political and policy environment of 2009-2010 will probably be much different than it was in 1994-1995. Back then, the military was basically united in its opposition to significant changes in nuclear weapons policy and its disdain for President Clinton, and the civilian nuclear weapons bureaucracy still had a great deal of clout within the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, where an ascendant Republican majority was eager to harass the Clinton administration. None of these conditions are likely to be replicated any time soon, so I’m inclined to believe that the bureaucracy is not the force it once was.

But I wouldn’t want to underestimate it either. There is growing political interest in revisiting U.S. nuclear weapons policy — Congress has mandated the next administration to complete a formal Nuclear Posture Review by early 2010, U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have emphasized the importance of revisiting U.S. nuclear weapons strategy, and there’s that Shultz/Perry/Kissinger/Nunn effort — but talk is cheap. Any serious effort to change the posture will still require presidential commitment and sustained attention from the president’s senior political appointees.

The trouble is, it is tempting for a busy administration to relegate nuclear weapons policy to the category of “tending the garden,” and not “putting out fires.” And the next U.S. administration will sure inherit plenty of fires: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and growing regional clout, a broken U.S.-Russia relationship, and an incoherent missile defense policy run by a troubled agency (to name but a few). And guess who the lead or deputy firefighter is for pretty much all these issues? Yup — it’s the ASD SO/LIC&IC.

That’s an awful lot of fires for one person to battle. Will this individual realistically have the time and energy to shepherd an NPR that goes beyond a low common denominator? If not, does the DAS for Strategic Capabilities have enough clout to pick up the slack? Would it help if that position was spun off into its own office headed by an assistant secretary?

These are tough questions to answer in the abstract, but the next administration must wrestle with them if it is serious about changing U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

Comment [5]