ArmsControlWonk.com

Once [Follow-On To Lance] had been cancelled [in May 1990], as well as the upgrade for nuclear artillery, and the INF Treaty had eliminated all longer-range missiles, only dual-capable aircraft remained available for SACEUR’s use as a nuclear deterrent. The rancor raised by the FOTL debate carried forward in to a broad public concern over any nuclear forces, thereby putting the spotlight on [dual-capable aircraft]. In response, NATO chose over the next 15 years to minimize public discussion or awareness of this aspect of its deterrent mission.”

— Jeffrey A. Larsen, The Future of U.S. Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons and Implications for NATO: Drifting Toward the Foreseeable Future (2006)

Make that 20 years. For about a generation’s time now, the North Atlantic alliance has been drifting, in Larsen’s words, “toward the withering away of its nuclear capabilities.” Nuclear debates have been deferred indefinitely, leading to the present situation, wherein acquisition decisions (or non-decisions) have long substituted for fundamental policy choices.

But now we’re having the discussion, which at times has manifested as a semi-public debate between the German Foreign Ministry and the German Defense Ministry. Behold the nuclear side of what SecDef Gates recently dubbed “the demilitarization of Europe – where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it.”

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Now that the argument has finally commenced, the official silence and habitual secrecy surrounding the exact numbers and whereabouts of NATO’s bombs must rank among the quirkier legacies of the Big Shhh that descended years ago over U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe. Consider this passage from the above-cited study by Larsen, which was sponsored by NATO:

Most estimates claim that there remain several hundred U.S. tactical nuclear warheads in Europe, at some eight bases in six European nations that could be delivered by a fleet of dual-capable aircraft (fighter-bombers) manned by up to eight allied nations. [5]

[5] See, for example, Hans Kristensen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe: A Review of Post-Cold War Policy, Force Levels, and War Planning (Washington: Natural Resources Defense Council, February 2005); Kristensen and Stan Norris, “NRDC Nuclear Notebook: U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2006,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 2006, pp. 68-71; and Brian Alexander and Alistair Millar, eds., Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Emergent Threats in an Evolving Security Environment (Washington: Brassey’s, 2003).

Or this passage from an instant classic of Shhh, a February 2010 paper by Franklin Miller, George Robertson, and Kori Schake:

According to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), the US possesses about 1,200 tactical nuclear weapons, of which 500 are operational warheads (the rest are in storage or in the process of being dismantled). The FAS indicates that 200 of the operational weapons are deployed in Europe, stationed with US and allied air crews in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey. [2]

[2] Federation of American Scientists, http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2009/03/russia-2.php.

Now, George Robertson used to be NATO’s Secretary-General. Who supposes that he needs Hans Kristensen & Co. to tell him where the bombs are?

This sudden deference to NRDC or FAS is the NATO equivalent of a phrase that appears, in some version, in every Israeli news report or commentary about Israel’s “nuclear option”: According to foreign media… That fig leaf is enough to keep the military censor out of the hair of reporters and editors.

Jive Turkey

Speaking of figs, NATO’s extreme case study in formal opacity may be Turkey, where, as Alexandra Bell has reported, military officials are far from ready to concede the obvious:

Turkish officials were cagey about discussing these weapons. A former Air Force general, following what seemed to be the official line, denied that there were nuclear weapons in Turkey, saying they were removed at the end of the Cold War. This differed from the other officials I met, whose wink-wink references basically confirmed the presence of the nukes. They also hinted that the weapons would be critically important if a certain neighbor got the bomb.

Turkish civilian officials, as ACW’s own Jeff Lewis has gathered, seem to take an altogether different view on the importance of U.S. nuclear weapons hosted abroad. Turkey may be as divided as, say, Germany on the matter.

There’s a limit to the comparison, of course: Germany isn’t undergoing the revolution in civil-military relations that is Turkish political life today.

Latest News: Cold War Still Over

But enough talk about talking about not talking. Whether to act — to withdraw an undisclosed number of tactical nuclear weapons from undisclosed locations in Europe — will be on the agenda of the conference of NATO Foreign Ministers next month in Tallinn, Estonia. It should be mighty interesting. This comes on the heels of a Japanese decision to disavow explicitly any claim to standing over American decisions on tactical nukes, and a Japanese news report alleging that the Americans have, as a courtesy, telegraphed an upcoming decision on that front. We’ll have to wait and see if that’s really so.

Whenever it comes and however it comes, change is coming. As with strategic weapons, but perhaps moreso, the ground has shifted around tactical nuclear weapons. Kids today have no idea what’s meant by the Fulda Gap — trust me on this one. But everyone’s heard of Osama.

For further reading: Pavel Podvig and yours truly at the Bulletin.

Comment [2]

Julian Borger has a post up on the Nuclear Posture Review, in which I liken choosing among the two options on declaratory policy to the choice between plague and cholera.

Chris Jones over at PONI literally doesn’t understand the argument, which leads me to think that if a smart guy like Chris can be so confused, then I should explain more.

My preferred option for declaratory policy is to state the purpose for possessing nuclear weapons, rather than speculating on when a future President might use them:

The United States maintains nuclear weapons to deter and, if necessary, respond to nuclear attacks against ourselves, our forces, or our friends and allies.

My reason for phrasing it this way, as Josh Pollack captured, is to avoid the “what-if questions meant to exhume sinister contradictions” in our nuclear policies. That’s much better than I said it.

The authors of the NPR appear to have internalized this message — to talk about the purpose, rather than speculate on use — but the two options for the final document, as described by Borger and Josh Rogin, are very unsatisfying to me.

The first choice is to state that the the primary purpose is deterrence. This, in my opinion, merely draws attention to any secondary purposes, which is precisely the conversation to be avoided. It’s better not to have a declaratory policy that raises an obvious question unless you know the answer to that question in advance. And it seems to me that no good can come of answering what “secondary” purposes might exist. The fact is that decisions about the size, composition and posture of our nuclear forces are all made in the service of deterrence. Anything else is a lesser included case that is not a fit subject for discussion in polite company.

The second choice is to say that our goal is for some future President to someday be able state that the “sole purpose” is deterrence. (For the record, I am not wedded to the adjective “sole.”) To articulate the preferred outcome as a goal, rather than a description of current policy, is is almost, though not quite, as bad.

This is a simple question: Why do we have these awful things? Setting sole purpose as a “goal” leaves this question unanswered. We know what the purpose is not (solely deterrence), but not what is. We are left to guess at which purposes might prevent the Obama Administration from answering this simple question forthrightly. Rather than lamely admitting that the posture (and the posture review) is in some sense a disappointment, one might as well defend the role of extending nuclear deterrence to conventional attacks against allies.

A second downside of admitting that the reality of a nuclear policy falls short of our ideal is the degree to which it implicitly undermines the goal set in Prague. The President committed the United States to seek the “peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” The logical corollary of that statement, is that all other threats — including those to our allies — could be met with what Bundy, Crowe and Drell called “prudent conventional readiness.” The argument, especially in Paris, has been that it is easy for the United States to seek a world without nuclear weapons given our vast conventional military power. If the United States today doesn’t have enough conventional capabilities to relegate nuclear weapons to the task of deterring nuclear attacks, no country ever will.

Still, it must be admitted that “sole purpose” is an admirable goal for US nuclear weapons policy, even if admitting that the reality of US nuclear policy falls short of it makes the Prague Speech look a little naive.

Yet, I do not understand why we can’t simply state that the purpose of the weapons narrowly, while declining to speculate on their use. After all, as a practical matter, the United States maintains nuclear weapons today for purpose of deterring, and if necessary responding to, nuclear attacks against the United States and our allies. Any other scenario is, at best, a lesser-included case.

The President should just say so.

All this is terribly disappointing, but fortunately it is not the sort of disappointment that can’t be overcome with a stiff Manhattan at the University Club with an old friend. I guess in that way it really isn’t like plague or cholera. Until tomorrow …

Comment [7]

Laura Rozen in the Politico has written an interesting article on the Nuclear Posture Review. In it, an anonymous US official described the Nuclear Posture Review as “seminal.”

I would have picked a different bodily discharge.

But, this is the new Arms Control Wonk.com. So you won’t see any references to excrement or suggestions that a seminal document is precisely what one would expect from a circle jerk like the NPR.

Really, we’re above all that.

Rozen depicts a very conventional document that will fall far short of the President’s rhetoric in Prague:

Disarmament hands say the review draft originally headed by the Defense Department’s Brad Roberts was too status quo on the policy issues from the administration’s perspective, and is being reworked at the senior inter-agency level by Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Jim Miller, officials from the office of State’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher, and White House and OVP nonproliferation advisors before heading to the president’s desk.

[snip]

Non-proliferation hands in and out of the administration question why the Obama team would have expected any differently since it put career civil servants with more traditional views on arms control, including the DoD’s Roberts, and NSC Senior Directors Barry Pavel and George Look, in key roles on the NPR.

“If you want a transformational document, you don’t ask two men who have spent a combined forty years in the bureaucracy to do this job,” another non-proliferation hand who asked for anonymity said.

I think the “anonymous nonproliferation hand” is mistaken to lay the blame on specific individuals like Roberts, Pavel or Look. This is about the structure of the process, not the people.

I fully expect the Nuclear Posture Review to be disappointing — the structure of such a review is designed to produce a status quo document. I have previously recommended Janne Nolan’s “An Elusive Consensus.” Heck I even invited her to give a talk on the prospects for the NPR at the New America Foundation. (She was great, by the way.)

It has long been clear, as both Joe Cirincione and I wrote this fall, that the Nuclear Posture Review was shaping up as a very status quo document. For participants to suddenly be shocked leads me to ask “What rock have you been living under for the past year?”

(In other news: Michael Jackson is dead, the New Orleans Saints are Superbowl champions and the junior senator from Massachusetts is a Republican. It’s been an odd year.)

The danger from a Nuclear Posture Review has always been, and continues to be, that the President will not get real options. Guess who is to blame for that? You may recall this sign on Harry Truman’s desk.

One of the under-reported stories in Washington is the dominance of Robert Gates on national security issues (with Elizabeth Rubin’s profile in Time magazine is a notable exception.) Gates openly discussed the likely conclusions of the NPR back in September, with nary a public peep from the President. The NPR, of course, is supposed to provide options to the President, not conclusions.

Gates has been boxing in Obama for about a year now. Which is what powerful cabinet secretaries do. Hate the game, not the player.

In form, the NPR will contain nominal options for the President to chose among. Yet the question continues to be whether those options will reflect real differences in policy, or just three articulations of the same Cold War dogma on the role of nuclear weapons. A draft of the NPR is going around and, from everything I hear, there is no reason for me to change this passage I wrote in August:

If the Nuclear Posture Review is truly going, as the President has promised, “to put an end to Cold War thinking” on nuclear weapons, throw out the f’ing reports. The Strategic Posture Commission is not the Bible. No need to turn Pentagon offices into monasteries where scholars perform exegesis on the sacred text. Most the Commissioners don’t remember what they had for breakfast, let along the arcane compromises they agreed to a couple of months ago. (If you’ve actually run such a project you know how ephemeral such agreements can be.)

Instead, give the President three or four real options. Not three flavors of vanilla. Not a couple of flavors like “dirt” and “cat urine” intended to make a scoop of vanilla comparatively appetizing.

That, by the way, is the core of what Joe [Cirincione] had to say in the meeting I described: There is every reason to doubt, at this stage, that the Nuclear Posture Review will give the President real options. A set of real options would reflect, rather than obscure, the very different views about how much the details matter [to the stability of deterrence].

Comment [20]

Oh, shut up already!

Some enterprising Belgian military spokesperson has decided to announce to the entire world that of the two sets of 11 hardened shelters at Kleine Brogel Airbase, the activists were in the one without nuclear weapons:

A similar stunt occurred last November, according to Ingrid Baeck, a chief spokeswoman for the Belgian Ministry of Defense, who sought to minimize the danger.

“I can assure you these people never, ever got anywhere near a sensitive area,” Baeck said in a telephone interview Friday. “They are talking nonsense.”

[snip]

But Baeck challenged the activists’ claims they went undetected for well over an hour, that guards were unarmed and that they were able to approach a hardened bunker containing sensitive materiel undeterred.

“It was an empty bunker, a shelter,” Baeck said of the building.

Way to paint a target on the loaded ones, genius.

Just take your lumps, because you can’t pretend Belgian security didn’t fail. The activist incursion is an alarming anecdotal demonstration of a systemic security problem that was well documented before the February incident.

In some important ways, Baeck is exaggerating herself — for example, we can see that the guard’s weapon is not loaded — but the real problem is that she also revealed where the activists ought to have gone. Nice way to get some kid shot on April 3, when they come back.

Yes, there are two sets of 11 shelters at Kleine Brogel, only one of which has WS3 vaults (Here is a set of Google Earth placemarks). The activists assumed that the one they accessed was the nuclear one based on their previous analysis (and the serendipity of an open gate).

The other area seems to have a more impressive fence line. That is probably, as Ms. Beack suggests, the location of the hardened shelters with WS3 vaults. (By the way, I wish I had been as careful in my post text as I tried to be in my image captions.)

If you look at the pictures of the General Tom Hobbins visiting the 701 MUNSS at Kleine Brogel in March 2006, there are two wide-angle pictures that confirm the location of the WS3 as the area I have place-marked as A. The activists were in B.

Lt. Erline Wyseur (left) and Capt. Jason Long, 701 MUNSS, meet Gen. Tom Hobbins, U.S. Air Forces in Europe commander, during his unit visit March 10.

If you open up the Google Placemarks, I am pretty sure they are standing in front of the shelter marked A3, with A4 in the background.

You can see the hardened aircraft shelter, aligned at a 45 angle to the taxiway, over Hobbins’s right shoulder.

A tree line runs along the left side of the taxiway and wraps behind the shelter, before breaking to a clear view of the horizon.

Over Long’s left shoulder, there is a small clump of trees. In the high resolution image, you can also see what looks like a ditch. The obstruction visible over Hobbin’s right shoulder appears to be related to the ditch.

On the far side of the ditch, there is a small road that crosses the taxiway and it is visible over Hobbin’s right shoulder.

There is no other bunker arrangement that even looks close. Moreover, here is another shot of Hobbins at a facility about 100 meters to the north.

Chief Master Sgt. James Fleshman, 701 MUNSS, meets Gen. Tom Hobbins, U.S. Air Forces in Europe commander, during his unit visit March 10.

Again — this doesn’t change the fact that Belgian security turned in a woeful performance. (I am still scratching my head over the lack of guard dogs.) This was an anecdotal demonstration of something that is, as I noted before, well-documented by US officials. Moreover, it’s quite a stretch for Baeck to say that the activists “never, ever got anywhere near a sensitive area” — they were inside the wire, which is a plausible definition of “near,” and the two areas are less than two clicks from one another.

I continue to think that if the Belgian government (and other NATO governments) refuse to provide adequate security at Kleine Brogel, the weapons should be placed at US base where we will.

And a note to our Belgian friends. I was going to keep these to myself, but since Ms. Baeck decided to help out, there isn’t much point. But please don’t try to get into area A. If the Belgian security is inadequate, the SACEUR has almost certainly assigned additional US security personnel. They will most likely respond very differently than the Belgian sort you are used to.

Comment [7]

Holy crap.

If you watch this video on YouTube it is very clear that a group of Belgian peace activists not only got inside the wire at Kleine-Brogel Airbase — where some US nuclear weapons may be stored — but they also got into the area where the hardened shelters are located (within the shelters are aircraft and WS3 storage vaults with US B61 nuclear gravity bombs.)

Between the Youtube video, a pair of stories on the Der Standard and Neusblad websites, their Facebook page and website, and Google Earth, it is pretty easy to recreate their path. (Hans K came to the same conclusion.)

Here are some images, with annotations linked to the time stamps in the video.

It looks like the activists approached Kleine-Brogel from the farms to the south of the airbase. Indeed, another group hopped the fence in November 2009. Apparently, they planned to go out on the runway and get arrested just like the previous group in November 2009. But, according to the group’s website “to their surprise, they were able to walk for over an hour on the runway.” (One of the press reports suggests it was forty minutes.)

The base is surrounded by signs indicating that the area is patrolled by guard dogs, but Milou was nowhere to be found.

Eventually, they noticed an open gate to the area where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored. Belgian peace groups had previously identified the area based on a map handed out an airshow. (As you can see from their website, they had very good maps.)

It looks like this was a side gate — apparently it had been left open to keep from freezing shut — so the activists were able to enter the secure area and approach one of the hardened aircraft shelters from the rear. If you could get inside, it would look something like this.

Well, I suspect the vault (with the bomb) would be in the floor.

The activists defaced the shelter with stickers and then emerged onto the concrete plaza in the center of the area.

They then walked the length of the plaza — having traversed both the width of the base, and now the width of the secure area for nuclear weapons — when security force finally showed up.

The “security force” appears to comprise one moderately annoyed-looking Belgian guy with a rifle. (Which RAJ47 observes is unloaded.) The effect would only be more comedic if he had some powdered sugar on his face and maybe a little bit of waffle stuck to his uniform.

How The [REDACTED] Did This Happen?

The reality is that significant shortcomings exists in the security of European airbases where US nuclear weapons are stored. That was made absolutely clear to me on my visit to SHAPE — and it was reported in the 2008 Air Force Blue Ribbon Review. Host-nations are supposed to provide security but they often cut corners. This is basically confirmed by the Belgian commander of the base, who explained that he just doesn’t have enough security forces:

Onze luchtmachtbasis is in totaliteit 450 hectare groot. Een derde is bosgebied waarin ik me drie weken kan bevinden zonder te worden gezien. Vandaar dat we onze bewaking, gelet op onze getalsterkte, concentreren op enkele gevoelige zones.

That works out to, more or less, “Our airbase is 450 hectares in size. A third is wooded areas in which I could stay perfectly well for three weeks without being seen. That is why we concentrate our surveillance on a few sensitive zones where there are aircraft and equipment.” (The translation is by the Open Source Center.)

Mort Halperin tells a funny story about when, in the late 1990s, then-German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called on NATO to adopt a policy of no-first use, widely seen at the time as the beginning of a discussion about withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Germany. Mort, then serving in the Clinton Administration, told a colleague that the German government had opened the door to the removal of US forward-deployed nuclear weapons. His colleague retorted: “You are not talking to the real German government.”

What Mort’s colleague meant was that there is — and has been for many years — a gap between Europe’s public, represented by elected leaders, and the so-called “real” governments — the national security bureaucracies in NATO and the European allies. So while NATO and European defense ministries make the case privately that forward-based nuclear weapons are politically and militarily essential to NATO, European political leaders have declined to make that case to their constituents for the money to modernize either aircraft or to keep up security.

What Should We Do?

As excuses go “It’s a big, wooded base and I don’t have that many troops” doesn’t cut it. In fact, when we are talking about nuclear weapons, it frankly sucks. When it comes to securing nuclear weapons, the United States Air Force has standards for both denial and recapture. If the Belgians and other NATO members won’t provide the forces and equipment necessary to meet both standards, then it is time to put the weapons on a US airbase.

The most direct route to securing US nuclear weapons in Europe is to immediately — like yesterday — consolidate all remaining forward deployed nuclear weapons to just one or two US airbases in Europe. Take your pick from Aviano, Incirlik, Lakenheath and Ramstein. This would immediately improve the overall security of the weapons, while starting a dialogue about whether forward-deployed weapons are really essential to maintaining NATO’s nuclear character twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is a point that several of us made in a letter to the President

The actual removal of such weapons should await formal consultations within NATO and may, in part, depend on arms control negotiations with Russia. But a useful first step would be the immediate consolidation of remaining forward-deployed nuclear weapons to one or two U.S. airbases in Europe.

The classic argument for leaving US nuclear weapons on European bases has always been burden-sharing — there is a value to forcing European governments to make the public case for spending money on NATO’s nuclear mission. Of course, that assumes that the governments actually make the necessary investments, rather than skimping on security.

Given the appalling state of security at Kleine Brogel, that argument seems unpersuasive today.

Update | 6:40 pm K-Reif reminds me that I outlined precisely this scenario at the Carnegie Endowment:

[T]he dominant character … of those weapons in Europe is that we don’t talk about them. I think NATO countries have been incredibly reluctant to make the public case about why they need U.S. nuclear weapons on their soil. And as a result … you see a corresponding lack of funding for security at the sites at which the European allies provide security …

[snip]

… I worry very much about a singularity, an event. It could be a security event. Our friends from Peace Action Belgium, could get in the wire with a cell phone and take a picture of a [hardened shelter].

[snip]

I do worry that something could happen that will deny NATO its preferred option of not talking about this, and then force the participants into a very ugly public debate in which the result would be the rapid, disorganized, uncoordinated withdrawal of the weapons amidst recriminations. And to me that would be much worse than beginning the dialogue about what the optimal posture is and whether that includes weapons.

[Emphasis mine]

It’s a little weird that I called Peace Action Belgium — that is sheer coincidence.

Update | 8:34, 5 February 2010 I somehow missed that Stephen Schwartz and Noah Shachtman were first — so many social media and blog pages, so little time!

Comment [19]

The Administration has proposed a massive increase in funding for the nuclear weapons complex, increasing the budget for NNSA by 13.4 percent (over what the FY2010 appropriation.)

John Fleck has an excellent write-up of the announcement in the Albuquerque Journal.

The purpose of announcing the massive increases in funding for the nuclear weapons enterprise — stockpile support (25 percent increase), infrastructure (5 percent) and other categories is political — is presented as the right thing to do, which it may be, but it is also intended to find votes in the Senate for ratification of the START Follow-on Treaty and, at a later date, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The budget release follows a major op-ed by Vice President Biden in the Wall Street Journal that makes explicit the link between funding the complex and achieving the agenda laid out in Prague:

Our budget request is just one of several closely related and equally important initiatives giving life to the president’s Prague agenda. Others include completing the New START agreement with Russia, releasing the Nuclear Posture Review on March 1, holding the Nuclear Security Summit in April, and pursuing ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Some of my friends are complaining that by funding the complex first and asking for START (and CTBT) ratification second, the Administration is spending is squandering its only leverage.

I worry about that, too. But I think this is the right approach, given the structure of the Senate and the President’s temperament.

Let’s hold aside, for the moment, the argument that the complex is deteriorating and people are leaving. I suspect that lack of funding isn’t the primary challenge facing the labs nor is more money a sufficient remedy for their woes. But more money is probably a necessary element of a comprehensive strategy to fix the labs. This is, all things considered, probably the correct policy decision.

The Politics of Treaty Ratification

But is it good politics? Barack Obama said he preferred to be a great one term president, rather than a mediocre two-term President. No one believe him of course, because the two are often correlated — the ability to achieve policy successes depends in large part on the same political acumen that aids reelection.

There are basically two approaches to getting to 67 votes in the United States Senate to ratify an arms control treaty. One option is to peel off just enough Republican Senators, convincing them to break ranks with their party in exchange for specific benefits or out of fear of losing reelection. The other is to secure the support of both the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders, so that the issue does not become partisan at all.

I hate to point this out, but only one of these two strategies has ever worked for an arms control treaty (at least as far as I can tell.) Securing the support of the opposition leadership is essential to avoiding a straight party-line vote that is more about partisanship than the national interest. This is why Michael Krepon, who edited the wonderful Politics of Treaty Ratification, blogged that “ratification usually happens by comfortable majorities or not at all.” John Isaacs made this point, as well.

This is the context in which to understand Senator Jon Kyl’s opposition to the various arms control treaties: He is Minority Whip and aspires to be the leading Republican voice on security issues. Perhaps, like another aspiring whip, he imagines even greater offices are within his grasp. His strategy to achieve these things is to make votes on arms control treaties a test of Senator’s Republican bona fides.

To worry that Senator Kyl might “pocket” this concession and ask for ever more rather misses the point. Of course, he’s going to do that (and more)! He’s not an idiot, after all. But nor is Senator Kyl the proper object of a ratification strategy — or at least he shouldn’t be.

The practical reality is that the Administration has to bring a majority of the Republican caucus along to support START and CTBT — even if fewer votes are technically required. If you look at the dozen of so candidates the Administration might hope to “peel off” — such as John McCain or Richard Lugar — few of them will be eager about the prospect of crossing over on a party line vote. The key to ratification has always been Mitch McConnell — and will be as long as he is Senate Minority Leader.

Depoliticizing START and CTBT

Which brings us to the budget roll-out. I don’t have any special insight into how Vice President Biden — who is spear-heading ratification process for START and CTBT — is going about cutting a deal. But I seem to recall he is familiar with the Senate.

If the strategy is to avoid, to the greatest extent possible, politicizing either treaty, starving the nuclear weapons complex probably won’t create leverage with the Senate Minority Leader and might, in fact, backfire. If you give Republicans a choice between a well-funded nuclear weapons complex and a talking point to conflate the Prague agenda with unilateral disarmament — which is a favorite claim by Senator Kyl — most will understandably choose the latter. “Unilateral disarmament” is the “death panel” of the nuclear weapons debate. The goal, then, is to take away Kyl’s talking points, rather than to horse-trade with Senators. (That comes later.)

Frankly, this is probably the only strategy an Obama Administration would undertake. It is difficult to imagine this President taking the bare-knuckled approach that we might have gotten from, say, Lyndon Johnson. However much juice his presidency has left — and that is the popular parlor question of the moment, for people in Georgetown who can afford parlors — for better or for worse, Barack Obama has his own style.

I cannot, for example, imagine Obama, as LBJ did, holding a meeting in the buff at the White House swimming pool or dictating to poor Doris Kearns from the commode. For better, or for worse.

So, we are left with the strategy of attempting to depoliticize the treaties, recognizing that there will be some additional horse-trading at a later date. It might not always succeed, but it is probably the only strategy that will.

Comment [14]

Sorry for the light blogging of late — as usual, I am writing a lot, just not finishing anything.

I notice this very interesting story by Paul Richter in the Los Angeles Times on deliberations over the Nuclear Posture Review. In particular, Richter summarizes the debate over “declaratory” policy — public statements about the role of US nuclear weapons.

The core debate is between those who want to declare that the “sole purpose” of US nuclear weapons is to deter and, if necessary, respond to nuclear attacks. On the other are those who want to limit the role to “existential” threats — whatever that means.

Richter’s summary of the debate is, more or less, also my understanding.

A core issue under debate, officials said, is whether the United States should shed its long-standing ambiguity about whether it would use nuclear weapons in certain circumstances, in hopes that greater specificity would give foreign governments more confidence to make their own decisions on nuclear arms.

Some in the U.S. argue that the administration should assure foreign governments that it won’t use nuclear weapons in reaction to a biological, chemical or conventional attack, but only in a nuclear exchange. Others argue that the United States should promise that it would never use nuclear weapons first, but only in response to a nuclear attack.

Pentagon officials question the value of such public declarations, contending that foreign governments may not even believe them, said the U.S. officials and others.

During the Cold War, Soviet officials declared that they would use nuclear weapons only in response to a nuclear attack. But when Soviet archives were opened, it became clear that “there were scenarios where they would have contemplated first use,” said Charles Ferguson, a former State Department official who now heads the Federation of American Scientists.

The lingering skepticism that resulted could carry over to similar U.S. declarations, limiting their worth, some officials have argued.

A “no-first-use” policy may represent a bigger step than the Obama administration would be willing to take, private analysts said.

Instead, they think the administration might hedge its policy by saying, for instance, that the United States would use nuclear weapons only in situations that threatened its existence.

My view is basically the same as that expressed by Mort Halperin in Survival — an article that draws on work Mort, Arnold Kanter and I have done together at the New America Foundation.

The United States maintains nuclear weapons to deter and, if necessary, respond to nuclear attacks against ourselves, our forces, or our friends and allies.

This is probably the most consequential decision that will come out of the Nuclear Posture Review. It is very important that the President get it right.

The Problem With No First Use

I am temperamentally inclined toward a “no first use” pledge. (I don’t think it would be a huge gain for the United States, though nor do I think it is a huge danger.) But it does suffer from one very specific problem.

As it happens, I don’t think it would ever be in the interest of the United States would initiate the use of nuclear weapons. The late Michael Quinlan, for instance, once said in a meeting that “We do not foresee first use. We do not expect it. We will do everything in our power by our posture to sustain our expectation. But we cannot guarantee” that a situation will not arise that would force us to consider the first use of nuclear weapons.

Sir Michael’s objection, I thought, was quite sensible. Categorical statements are too simplistic for the real world. As a result, others don’t take such pledges seriously. Reassurance must be credible. I often see, in the Chinese case, this particular drawback of a no-first use pledge. Americans and others don’t take it seriously — although I think we should. As a result, Chinese academics and officials often get trapped in silly “what if” games.

Take the case of Chu Shulong, a Chinese academic who ended up in Chinese Military Power for what seems like a relatively innocuous interview:

The Director of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Stratgeic Studies, in an interview with a reporter from Da Gong Bao expressed, China’s promise not to be the first to use nuclear weapons was extremely clear and firm. As of now, their isn’t the slightest indication that China’s government will let go of this promise. ”(I) have not heard any leader on any occasion state China will change or let go of this position. Never.”

[snip]

At the same time Chu Shulong provided a hypothetical, except in the case of a foreign power launching a full scale war against China, using all of their advanced (precision) weaponry except nuclear weapons, and the Chinese nation were facing the danger of extermination, China may let go of this promise. But he considers the possibility not very great.

As a result, Chu Shulong ended up in Chinese Military Power declaring, “China may renounce [no first use] at a time when the country’s fate hangs in the balance.” A very similar thing happened to Sha Zukang regarding Taiwan.

This is a basic problem when statements are categorical — it is too easy for someone to use a “ticking time bomb” scenario (or Martians using non-nuclear lasers to incinerate elementary schools) that twist the speaker up in knots. The Chinese official or academic defending “no first use” has to either admit that, in a hot-blooded moment, that Chinese leaders might not be especially scrupulous about observing past statements or lamely repeat “China undertakes unconditionally not to use or threaten to use…”

Neither is very appealing.

I’ve had several Chinese participants tell me about a recent Track II meeting in Beijing where they explained China’s categorical no-first use pledge. The American participants, to make the classic point, rather clumsily suggested a hypothetical US conventional attack on China’s nuclear forces.

The Chinese participants freaked. [Perhaps I should say, “were disturbed.”]

The Americans went home satisfied that the Chinese weren’t very serious about no-first use; the Chinese left thinking they had been subjected to a very serious threat of coercion. And perhaps wondering if they should start planning for first-use scenarios. I am repeatedly asked about this interaction and was again during my last trip to Beijing. This particular Track II debacle is going to haunt the US-China nuclear dialogue for years.

I happen to agree with not using nuclear weapons first, but as a declaratory policy it does suffer from the problem that Sir Michael identified.

The Problem with Calculated Ambiguity

On the other hand, it isn’t like I think our current policy of calculated ambiguity is a god’s gift to declaratory policy. For one thing, the US policy isn’t actually an instance of ambiguity — in the sense of statement that could mean different things — but rather the current policy consists of two of logically inconsistent statements.

Our current policy is incoherent, not ambiguous.

As I noted this summer, “calculated ambiguity” often devolves into clumsy brandishing of nuclear weapons which is anything but ambiguous:

Particularly compelling, to me, is [Scott Sagan’s] demolition of “calculated ambiguity” using a case study from the Bush Administration. Whatever the appeal in theory, in real life “calculated ambiguity” degenerates into the clumsy brandishing of nuclear weapons.

I had been mulling a similar case study in a memo using the almost comical efforts to maintain “calculated ambiguity” regarding a possible nuclear strike against the Libyan facility at Tarhuna. The Clinton Administration looked like the Keystone Cops armed with nuclear weapons, which says something when you manage to upstage Muammar al-Gaddafi in a black comedy.

No need to, now. Scott executes a much cleaner demonstration of why “calculated ambiguity” is, to my mind, more trouble than it is worth …

Scott’s case study involved then-President Bush’s April 2006 statement that “All options are on the table” with regard to Iran, which was widely interpreted as a nuclear threat and ended with the UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw calling the idea of a nuclear strike against Iran “completely nuts.”

This is also a declaratory policy fail.

A More Sensible Declaratory Policy

These problems suggest two criteria for a declaratory policy — it must clearly articulate a limited role for nuclear weapons, but those limits should not be categorical. They really reflect a single observation: Declaratory policy must be, in part, designed for ease of execution. If it is too complicated, it may be paraphrased. If it is too simple, it may be shown to be foolish.

One option is to find a felicitous phrase — “last resort” or “existential threats” — that conveys the sense of a commitment, without actually making one. That is the essence of the ambiguity approach. (I happen to think that either formulation would improve on the current approach.)

An alternative — which I prefer — is to talk not about when the United States would use nuclear weapons at all, but rather why we have them.

If you think about it, we make decisions every day about our forces, policies and posture that need to be explained. We haven’t dropped the big one since 1945. So, our declaratory policy ought to defend the actions we do take, not ones we might. As it happens, I believe it is a true statement that the United States maintains nuclear weapons, either largely or exclusively, to deal with nuclear threats.

As for talking about nuclear use scenarios — well, the only way to win is not play! Look, you can always come up with an artificial, hypothetical that would compel the first use of a nuclear weapon against a kindergarten. (The kindergarten is sitting on top of a deeply buried bunker containing the Andromeda strain and there isn’t enough time to evacuate…)

No good can come of speculating on such hypothetical scenarios because the deck is stacked against you. Moreover, there is no reason to play these games, because such unlikely scenarios are irrelevant to our nuclear policy, force structure or posture. The very fact of having nuclear weapons, no matter what the President says, provides the appropriate measure of deterrence against these sort of unlikely speculations.

As a result, I tend to think talking about why we have nuclear weapons is a better approach than trying to find a phrase, such as “existential threats,” that explains when the President might use nuclear weapons. The “existential threats” formulation, in particular, will baffle foreign audiences, who in turn will ask what precisely threatens the existence of the United States and others. This discussion can only go badly. For example, are we saying we would forswear nuclear weapons in the event of a limited nuclear attack that didn’t threaten the existence of the United States? Would a North Korean biological attack threaten the existence of Japan? No good can come of answering such questions, yet declining eliminates much of the advantage in making the commitment in the first place.

It’s much better to state that neither of these cases — nor the truly weird cases like asteroids — have anything to do with why the United the States maintains a nuclear deterrent. United States nuclear policies, forces and posture are not shaped by the need to deter biological weapons or deflect asteroids. That’s the implicit meaning of the President’s statement that the United States seeks the security of a world without nuclear weapons: That all plausible non-nuclear threats can be met with conventional forces.

I happen to think that this is statement of fact about US policy, even if it is not the formal declaratory policy, and that the President should say so:

The United States maintains nuclear weapons to deter and, if necessary, to respond to nuclear attacks against ourselves, our forces, or our friends and allies.

Such a statement, by subtly changing the nature of the debate from use to possession, requires a certain amount of discipline. The President and his advisers would have to refuse to elaborate on its meaning, characterizing the statement as a “statement of fact” about why the United States maintains nuclear weapons. They would need to refuse to engage in “irresponsible speculation about hypothetical scenarios” involving the possible use of nuclear weapons. (You can add, “that have nothing to do with why the United States maintains nuclear weapons, which is…” if you really want to.)

The lone exception to the prohibition of discussing the “use” of nuclear weapons would be the existing negative security assurance — which would be politically calamitous to withdraw. In that case, I would revise to remove the “Warsaw Pact exclusion clause” on the grounds that there is no Warsaw Pact. It might read something like:

The United States will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon state-parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons that are in compliance with their nuclear nonproliferation obligations.

And since there are two nuclear weapons states — Russia and China — that the United States needs to address, I would make one last statement, drawn from the recent CFR Task Force co-chaired by Bill Perry and Brent Scowcroft.

With regard to Russia and China, mutual vulnerability (or deterrence) is not a policy choice, but a fact to be managed with strategic stability.

Taken together, I think these three statements would accurately convey the limited role that nuclear weapons play in US security in a manner that would neither alarm allies or comfort potential adversaries.

Update | 10:04 am January 6: Sorry about the truly staggering number of spelling slip ups. I was in a rush. Should be better now.

Comment [15]

This video is just a little more interesting than watching paint dry—until you realize that it is sound causing that little bright dot in the center! Sonoluminescence, light emitted by a plasma created at the center of a converging spherical sound wave, can be yours for about $100. Here are the instructions and here is a Scientific American article on the phenomena, which is closely related to the UD3 neutron generator.

I’ve been thinking about a small detail involving UD3 imitators ever since Jeffrey first published his very interesting post showing A. Q. Khan in front of a blackboard detailing Pakistan’s bomb design: why uranium deuteride? The uranium doesn’t participate in the nuclear aspects of the neutron generation, so why use it? I’m still not convinced I’ve understood the reasons behind this choice of material but the process of trying to understand it has been very enlightening.

Of course, one answer might be purely practical: there’s a whole bunch of uranium sitting in a bomb not doing anything until the first burst of neutrons is generated. Why not use it in the initiator? Such practical considerations undoubtedly do play an important role. But uranium has a very nice property that deuterium gas, for instance, does not: it’s very massive, an important consideration for shock compression. That mass, and how it’s packaged, might play a critical role in generating the pressure spike that compresses and heats up the deuterium to the 12 million degrees as reported in the Chinese paper.

What potential benefits does that mass bring to the initiator? The internal energy caused by the shock of the collision at the center of the device is proportional to the density of the material. Not the density of deuterium alone, but the total mass density. And the change in internal energy is also proportional to the shock pressure associated with this collision, which is much, much more intense than the shockwave that propagated through the UD3 to get it accelerating toward the center.

I’ve been trying to guess how fast that initial shock velocity was; another thing the Chinese paper—by not fully describing their experimental set up (they only give the outer radius of the high explosive as 8 cm)—has managed to conceal. I’ve estimated it as between 7 and 17 km/s, depending on how big the air gap between the aluminum and steel liner and the core really is. (The particle velocity is less than that.) One possible measure of just how important the uranium mass is comes from the paper reviewing Kaliski’s experiments using D2 gas, as pointed to by Robert Cross in Jeffrey’s original post. Through a fairly complex apparatus for focusing the shockwaves from a shaped charge (complicated if you wanted to place it next to a nuclear weapon’s pit, that is), Kaliski reported a particle velocity striking the deuterium gas of 50 km/s. Needless to say, the smaller the required velocity of the “strike,” the easier it should be to cause fusion.

But It’s More Than Just the Mass

Of course, just because deuterium is bonded to uranium doesn’t mean the compound has a high density. The theoretically maximum density of UD3 is about 11 g/cc; still quite dense if considerably less than the 19 g/cc for uranium metal. But that 11 g/cc is for a monolithic crystal. This is where material engineering really comes into play. You can increase the shock pressure—a seemingly important factor for increasing the final temperature—by increasing the density of the material. But you can also increase the temperature by making it more porous. In the language of shockwaves, you are increasing the change in “specific volume” (which is just the inverse of the density) as the material is crushed by the shock. This crushing, or compression, performs work on the material and heats it up. (That’s why the sonoluminescence experiment mentioned above needs a bubble in the center.) A monolithic crystal of UD3 would have a high pressure associated with the collision but not much work would be done—because of the relatively small compression associated with the solid crystal—and hence would not produce much of an increase in temperature. The Chinese, on the other hand, used a material with an initial density of 6 g/cm^3, which I assume is in the form of a sintered powder.

The effects of increasing the porosity of a material has been well documented in the open literature. Furthermore, increases in temperature appear to increase with increasing density of the porous metal’s “parent material” (bulk copper, for instance, is the parent material of copper powder). But most reproducible results involve temperature changes less than 10,000 K; about a factor a thousand less than the Chinese report. Of course, it is possible that the results mentioned in the literature were based on bulk temperatures and the fusion-type environments only happen over a very small volume that can only be measured by looking for the fusion-induced neutrons. (Just to be clear, I’m purposely grasping at straws here.) On the other hand, the Chinese measured a maximum of 48 neutrons in their detector and “corrected” that value by a whopping big factor to infer a yield of 50 thousand neutrons. To make maters worse, I saw nothing in the Chinese paper to indicate that they measured the effects of setting off 252 high speed detonators close to the sensitive preamps attached to their barium fluoride proportional counters. That might cause a lot of ringing in the signals.

Figure from the Chinese paper. After reading their caption, try saying “preamp noise” to see how that fits. (The darker black areas are in the original article.)

At the end of this process, I still don’t know why it is uranium deuteride. Can such high density materials like uranium be used to provide exactly the right balance between the two countervailing needs: high shock pressure and crushability? Or is UD3 a red herring and that famous (or infamous?) blackboard photograph an instance of carefully constructed of misdirection? As you might have guessed, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the possibility of using UD3 as a source of fusion neutrons initiated by conventional explosives.

Note on Proliferation: I’ve tried mightily to extract the UD3 shock Hugeniot from the Chinese paper and haven’t figured out a way of doing it. Through a carefully selected set of information actually published, I think the Chinese have managed to convey their results without creating a proliferation problem since that Hugeniot is really what you need to design an initiator. However, just because I can’t do it doesn’t mean it is impossible so I agree with Jeffery’s decision not publish the paper here. This, of course, just propagates the problems arising from censoring science: a lack of full peer review etc.

I’d like to thank Prof. Andrew Higgins for pointing me to a number of important papers in the literature and helpful pointers as I tried to understand this issue. I highly recommend one of Andrew’s suggestions: Paul Cooper’s “Explosive Engineering” Of course, any mistakes I’ve made here are entirely mine.

Appendix: Hugoniots “Explained”

Once again, it has been pointed out to me that I’m way too techno-wonky on this one and failed to explain what a Hugoniot is. Of course, the best way to learn about them would be to read chapters 14 through 17 from Explosives Engineering. (Don’t worry, the book is excellent and you can jump in right to those chapters, which give a very readable physical explanation of shock waves. They get progressively more “mathy” but its all algebra and I urge you to work through them. If you don’t feel like that, just read Chapter 14, which doesn’t use any math at all.) But for the skinny, let me say that a material’s response to shocks can be characterized almost entirely by one graph and that graph can, for most materials, be characterized by a single number. The graph is a plot of the shock velocity vs. the velocity of the particle and the single number is the slope of that line in what is, in most cases, a straight line. This is called the U-u Hugoniot and other Hugoniots associated with the material are simply derived from it.

As you might expect, a shock wave, which is just a pressure wave has a higher velocity that the particles that get accelerated by the shock as it pass over them. But once the these parameters have been determined, it can be used to plot the same Hugoniot line but in terms of different variables, all of which are related to the original line by the laws of physics. In particular, you can plot the pressure of the shock wave verse the “specific volume,” the inverse of the density. This plot is important because the area under a line drawn from the initial, unshocked state, to the state after the shock wave has passed through is equal to the internal energy of the material. In our case here, by increasing the porosity of the material, we have increased the area under the graph and hence the total internal energy. A word of warning: the temperature is different from the total internal energy.

An example of a typical Hugoniot where pressure is plotted against specific volume (i.e. the inverse of density). The area under the Raleigh line is equal to the shock induced internal energy (including potential energy stored in chemical bonds of compressed materials.)

Comment [53]

Ok, this is just downright weird.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen rounds up the usual crowd to co-sponsor an utterly meaningless “Sense of the House” on the START Treaty. (Utterly meaningless since the Senate ratifies treaties. I don’t even want to hear about implementing legislation.)

The resolution is largely about China, and how that might impact the START Treaty, which is a very odd thing to say given the disparity between US and Chinese nuclear forces. Josh Rogin sort of snickers at the resolution:

The GOP’s own resolution actually states that China has about 40 nuclear-tipped missiles that could reach the continental United States today, and could only amass about 100 over the next 15 years.

That’s well below the levels being discussed between the U.S. and Russia — between 500 and 1,100 delivery vehicles each and between 1,500 and 1,675 deployed warheads. That has prompted some to wonder whether U.S. nuclear calculations should really be set with China in mind, considering that country’s relatively small nuclear arsenal.

“It’s silly really and undercuts their arguments for us to beef up our arsenal or do whatever it is they want to do with respect to nuclear weapons,” said one source working on the issue.

Max Bergman was more succint: “North Dakota could deter China.”

He means, of course, that China still has a long way to catch up to the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, one of three Minuteman wings in the United States. (Each wing now has 150 Minuteman III missiles. So Long, Deuce)

It is worth, however, considering the resolution on its merits, such as they are. The resolution boils down to two “asks” that are pretty standard GOP talking points (1) The Obama Administration should not sign a follow-on to START until the Nuclear Posture Review is completed and (2) The Obama Administration should not sign any agreement limiting missile defense.

Finish The Nuclear Posture Review

The resolution “urges the President to refrain from negotiating or entering into any follow-on agreement to START I until the Nuclear Posture Review is completed.”

DoD actually checked this box, as one of the awkwardly dated August 6 fact sheets on the NPR explains in some detail:

- The NPR made it an early priority to accomplish the analysis necessary to support the START Follow-on treaty negotiations, which President Obama and President Medvedev directed should be completed by December 2009, when START expires.

- The interagency NPR team, including the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Energy, and the US Strategic Command and other combatant commands analyzed and provided detailed consideration of a range of solutions to maintain strategic stability with operationally deployed strategic nuclear force levels that would represent significant reductions in nuclear weapons, presuming Russia will be similarly constrained.

- After rigorous analysis, the NPR team determined that maintaining a nuclear triad with a significantly reduced number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons (ODSNW) and accountable strategic delivery vehicles (SDV) would enhance our national security objectives and provide extended deterrence to allies and friends.

- These findings were reviewed by military and civilian leadership and vetted through the interagency. START Follow-on treaty negotiating positions were then subsequently identified and approved at the Cabinet level. Although the specific guidance to our negotiating team remains classified, the results to date of the bilateral negotiations are reflected in the Joint Understanding resulting from the Presidential Summit.

The “cabinet level” decision regarding START Follow-on numbers, which was detailed by Elaine Grossman, occurred during the second week of June at a Principals Committee meeting.

As I understand it, the analytic method was this: Using existing nuclear weapons planning guidance in NSPD-14, how low could we go? One commenter called it NSPD-14 friendly, which I think is about right.

This is a harmless bit of grandstanding — the sort of grandstanding that both parties use to delay an unwelcome decision. Hell, this is why Nuclear Posture Reviews exist — to delay. A Republican Congress created the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review to delay implementing START II cuts until after Clinton left office. A Democratic Congress created the 2009 Nuclear Posture Review to delay a decision on the Reliable Replacement Warhead until after George W. Bush left office.

We certainly don’t do Nuclear Posture Reviews because they are useful exercises. (They always suck, no matter how capable and hard-working everyone involved might be.) A quick read of Janne Nolan’s An Elusive Consensus would tell you that.

Do Not Agree to Any Limitations On Missile Defense

Let’s see, this is a great idea except for two small things.

One, the START Follow-on won’t contain any limitations on missile defenses. And, two, the missile defense system even under the Bush Administration was sized so as “not be a threat to China.”

Other than that, this is a totally germane and sensible thing to include in a Sense of Congress.

Other totally germane and sensible ideas in this spirit include: A Sense of the House that a START follow-on shouldn’t provide for taxpayer-funded abortions. And that no illegal immigrants may be permitted to handle nuclear weapons. Are there any other tired chestnuts I’ve forgotten? Ah yes, inspectors may not bring a domestic partner to Votkinsk.

Still, it is nice to be reminded that Republicans support missile defense. Sometimes I forget.

Comment [12]

Last winter, after a visit to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston — the Los Alamos or Livermore of the United Kingdom — I came away with a new understanding of how intertwined the US and UK nuclear weapons programs really are:

I think it comes as a shock to most people on either side of the Atlantic when they learn how much the UK depends on the United States for its nuclear deterrent. Even I was a little taken aback during my visit to Aldermaston when Don Cook, the Managing Director of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, began to address us in his flat American accent.

I thought “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Couldn’t they have found someone British?”

After a couple of days at the AWE, and a tour of the lovely historical collection, I accepted the reality that, no, the United Kingdom does not in any way, shape, or form have an independent nuclear deterrent.

Today comes the news that the White House has nominated the same Don Cook as Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration. He’s at least the second American to come into the Defense Programs gig after a stint at Aldermaston.

Seriously, it’s one nuclear weapons program, from the designs to the neutron generators.

Update | 11:07

In case you are interested, here is Don Cook’s biography, from the National Nuclear Security Administration:

Donald L. Cook, Nominee for Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs, National Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy

Dr. Donald L. Cook was the Managing Director of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in the United Kingdom from 2006 to 2009. In this capacity, he was accountable for AWE’s performance on the contract with the U.K. Ministry of Defence, which includes support of the U.K. Trident warheads and development and sustainment of capability in nuclear weapon design, development, manufacturing, qualification, assembly, transport, support in service, and finally, decommissioning, dismantlement, and disposal. Prior to heading AWE, Dr. Cook worked at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico for 28 years in Pulsed Power Sciences, Microtechnologies, Infrastructure, and Security. From 1999-2006, he was Director of the MESA Program Center, accountable for design and construction of the Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications (MESA) complex. In 2003, he assumed Program Director responsibilities for Sandia’s Infrastructure Program and for Sandia’s Safeguards and Security Technologies Program, which responded to a new Design Basis Threat. From 1977-1999, Dr. Cook led efforts in pulsed power accelerator design and experimentation, fusion research, hydrodynamics, radiography, diagnostic development, and computational code development. He managed the Sandia Inertial Confinement Fusion program from 1984-1993 and was Director of Pulsed Power Sciences from 1993-1999. Dr. Cook is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Institute of Physics (IOP).

Comment [5]