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I was famously quoted in the New York Times (and in Newsweek) as saying about the failure of the April 5th, 2009 satellite launch attempt:

It’s got to be embarrassing. I can imagine heads flying if the Dear Leader finds out the satellite didn’t fly into orbit.

Not too many people have noted the if in that quote — though I certainly wanted to emphasize it at the time. It turns out that the Dear Leader has not found out his satellite splashed into the sea: North Korea still maintain the satellite made it into orbit. One can certainly understand his advisors’ reluctance to correct that impression. I can even imagine Kim going to his space center to listen to it beep as it goes over head.

Unfortunately, its becoming clearer and clearer that North Korea really did achieve everything they need to to launch a two stage missile quite a distance.

Comment [6]

Following up on Geoff’s apt reference to the technology campaign trail, here’s more on Iran’s Fuel Manufacturing Plant, or FMP.

We’ve got the wonkporn interior photos, including shots of equipment that happened to be next to politicians.

We’ve got statements to the news media about future plans.

We’ve got multiple assessments of the significance of the facility. Because context is always good.

Update: Here’s even more context.

And did I mention the interior photos? Come check ‘em out.

Comment [10]

No, not the switch from an offense-dominated world to a defense-dominated one — you might remember that idea from the 1980s, kids — but the switch from a Republican administration to a Democratic one, and what that means for ballistic missile defense.

It’s been the major theme of the week over at TotalWonkerr.com.

Are You Down With OLC?

The eponymous Paul Kerr kicked things off by relaying an analysis of a recently released but generally overlooked Bush Office of Legal Counsel memo from November 2001, courtesy of an anonymous friend. The analysis starts with a clear statement of perspective:

“I’ve read the whole memo, and I think my head is about to explode.”

The OLC memo proposed a novel doctrine: the temporary, unilateral suspension of selected provisions of a treaty, in this case the ABM Treaty.

(This was just a few weeks after the Pentagon decided to forgo certain tests in order to avoid violating the treaty, and just a few weeks before the U.S. simply withdrew from the Treaty. So the proposed doctrine was never tested or deployed.)

I followed up by recalling some of the legal contortions at the Department of State in the 1980s — there’s that decade again — to reinterpret the Treaty to permit testing that most experts agreed was clearly banned.

Defense Acquisition: What Is It Good For?

I also called attention to a new GAO document that gently suggests to the Obama administration that it should have MDA do more to take combatant command priorities into account, try to measure its own progress, and consider operations and maintenance — not just acquisition — in planning and budgeting.

In other words, MDA should operate as a military program, not a political program.

Strategic ballistic missile defense expresses a worldview in ways most weapons systems do not. It’s unilateralism. Acquiring, testing, and deploying strategic BMD just seem to fit with at-will revision of treaties like peanut butter goes with jelly. And the philosophy of an administration does more to shape BMD’s budgetary footprint than do military requirements as defined by the Armed Services or Office of the Secretary of Defense.

So you want to know where BMD fits into the Obama vision. Don’t we all? It’s not mentioned in the White House’s FY 2010 budget book. Smacks of multilateralism to me.

Random Thoughts: Shallow, Medium, Deep

Other stray missile defense thoughts include an inquiry into the whereabouts of the Sea-Based X-Band Radar, a look at short-range missile defense in Israel, and Paul’s Aristotlean proof of the nonexistence of the ballistic missile threat.

Secretary Gates almost seems to agree.

And there’s oh-so-much more. Check it out.

Comment [1]

Last September, George Perkovich and I published an Adelphi Paper, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, which attempted to identify the challenges of getting to zero and how they might be overcome. Most of all, however, it called for serious international debate on the subject.

We have made an effort to catalyze such debate with our new book Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: A Debate. This book reproduces the original Adelphi Paper, followed by 17 responses from officials, analysts and authors representing 13 countries (nuclear-armed states and non-nuclear-weapon states). The volume ends with a concluding essay by George and me. And, it’s all available free of charge from here!

We made a real effort to have a broad spectrum of opinion with authors including Jonathan Schell, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Frank Miller, Scott Sagan and President Ernesto Zedillo.

As well as a lot of content, there are also some great pieces of writing. Let me share a couple of my favourites.

Sir Lawrence Freedman on the need for greater public engagement:

As things stand now, if governments start dragging their feet, it is hard to imagine vocal demands and public demonstration to get the process back on track. If nationalist politicians start to insist that their country is being duped into putting national security at risk, it is just as likely that demands to slow down would follow. As long as talk of abolition remains the diplomatic equivalent of easy-listening elevator music, and as political leaders remember to assert their belief in a world without war and weapons—and, while they’re at it, no more poverty and disease either—few will pay attention. Only as the talk becomes serious will public debate open up, and properly so. Depending on the political system, dissent from the official line may be vigorous and open or cryptic and furtive. In all cases, the course of the debate will be influenced by the interaction with whatever happens to be on the public agenda at the time and the passing concerns of the moment.

Zia Mian on the problem with framing the disarmament debate in terms of security:

Some arguments that policy makers may advance for abolition will certainly conflict with long-standing official narratives of national security that have served to justify a role for nuclear weapons. These arguments may trigger debates about what, if anything, could fill the nuclear-weapon shaped hole that would result from the abolition of nuclear weapons. The pursuit of disarmament may become tied to the search for reassurance through technological, strategic, and political substitutes for nuclear weapons. Other arguments for abolition may claim that eliminating nuclear weapons would not actually undermine the security calculation of a nuclear-armed state, but would in fact strengthen its position relative to rivals and in the international system. Such an argument could complicate efforts by some other states to make a case for disarming.

In addition, St. Anthony’s International Review has also joined the debate by publishing an excellent critique of our Adelphi Paper by Elbridge Colby and a response by us. Again, all available free of charge and worthwhile too because this exchange really helps crystalize an important aspect of the wider debate, in my opinion.

Enjoy.

Comment [23]

The most recent edition of Survival has a section on “Reinforcing the NPT”. One of the articles, “The Problem with Nuclear Mind Reading”, is by me (non-printable proof available here), and the other, entitled “Exposing Nuclear Non-Compliance”, is by former IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards, Pierre Goldschmidt (available for free here).

My article asks the question: Should we care why a non-compliant state has violated its non-proliferation undertakings, or instead focus on what it has done? My answer is that we should focus on actions not intentions—not least because the IAEA is not tasked with assessing intentions and it would be effectively impossible for it to do so.

If the topic sounds familiar to Wonk readers it probably is. The article grew out of my first ever posting on this blog and has been the subject of a few since then. [And was the subject of a talk James gave at the New America Foundation, which you can view on YouTube. — Jeffrey]

Anyway, like every other idea in non-proliferation, it turns out not to be so new. Its origin? The Acheson-Lilienthal Report. Where else? (The creators of South Park captured the feeling nicely in this episode, to which the title of this post is a tribute).

I was rereading A-L the other day, which as many of you will know, proposes international control of the fuel cycle (or rather, “dangerous” activities) by an Atomic Development Authority. The following passage described the inspection function of this body:

…the Authority will be aided in the detection of illegal operations by the fact that it is not the motive but the operation which is illegal. Any national or private effort to mine uranium will be illegal; any such stockpiling of thorium will be illegal; the building of any primary reactor or separation plant will be illegal. This circumstance is of very great importance for the following reason: It is true that a thoroughgoing inspection of all phases of the industry of a nation will in general be an unbearable burden; it is true that a calculated attempt at evasion may, by camouflage or by geographical location, make the specific detection of an illegal operation very much more difficult. But the total effort needed to carry through from the mine to the bomb, a surreptitious program of atomic armament on a scale sufficient to make it a threat or to make it a temptation to evasion, is so vast, and the number of separate difficult undertakings so great, and the special character of many of these undertakings so hard to conceal, that the fact of this effort should be impossible to hide. The fact that it is the existence of the effort rather then a specific purpose or motive or plan which constitutes an evasion and an unmistakable danger signal is to our minds one of the great advantages of the proposals we have outlined.

A lesson that, in my opinion at least, is still very relevant today.

Comment [9]

If you are like me, you were no doubt very excited about the first-ever CTBTO on-site inspection exercise at Semipalatinsk. (Rebecca Johnson turned in a some wonderful dispatches for the Bulletin, while Oliver Meier had a nice write-uP for Arms Control Today.)

Well, Andreas Persbo actually got to participate. Andreas will be in town this week, so I am hosting him for a meeting on Wednesday, along with David Hafmeister and James Acton to discuss how the CTBT can be verified.

Please RSVP

Is the Nuclear Test Ban Verifiable?

The 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty bans all nuclear explosions for military or civilian purposes, but the question remains: can we verify compliance with the Treaty?

Last year, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization held a very successful mock “on site inspection” at the former Soviet nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan.

The panelists, including VERTIC’s Andreas Persbo — who participated in the inspection exercise — will discuss on site inspection to explore the scope and reach of verification measures in light of a changing international political and security environment.

Start: 01/28/2009 – 10:00am
End: 01/28/2009 – 11:30am
New America Foundation
1630 Connecticut Ave NW, 7th Floor
Washington, 20009
United States

Participants

Featured Speakers
Andreas Persbo
Senior Researcher
Verfication Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC)

Dave Hafemeister
Senior Technical Advisor
Arms Control Association
Former lead technical-staff on nuclear testing, Department of State

James Acton
Associate, Nonproliferation Program
Carnegie Endowment for National Peace

Moderator
Jeffrey Lewis
Director, Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative
New America Foundation

Comment [9]

Just a reminder, dear colleagues and friends, I am giving a talk tomorrow at 4 pm at the Carnegie Endowment, followed by a happy hour at the Big Hunt.

Here are the details:

On behalf of Physicians for Social Responsibility, you are invited to “Steps to Zero,” an informative talk on steps the next administration and Congress can take towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons. This will be followed by a small wine and cheese reception.

Date: Tuesday, December 9, 2008, 4:00 to 5:30 p.m.

Location: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036

Speakers: Dr. Edward Ifft, Jenifer Mackby, Sharon Squassoni and Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

Am planning to bring a giant bucket of cold water.

RSVP to jparillo[at]psr.org

Comment [1]

If you are anything like me, you suffer a death of a thousand cuts when you see something on GoogleEarth and want to know how tall it is. For instance, you can measure the diameters of Iran’s heavy water exchange columns (3.5 m) but if you could only measure their height then maybe you could tell what their capacity was. It would seem a simple thing for Google to just to tell you the date and time of any individual pixel on a scene and then you could calculate the sun’s elevation. After all, they know which picture is contributing to each part of the Earth’s surface and each picture has a time stamp embedded in its geographical information. Be that as it may be, they don’t seem to want to do it.

But there is often—not always, but often—a date stamp on the bottom of the screen. I thought; why not use what ever you are interested in measuring as a Sun Dial to tell the “time” of the image? That’s exactly what my program calculateHeightFromShadow does! You can download it for free at my website’s download page. (Unfortunately, you also have to download and setup GUI_missileFlyout before you can use this height measuring program. This is because the MATLAB run library has to be on your computer and my website does not have the storage to allow me to put both up independently.)

So, what about those Iranian heavy water exchange columns? They are approximately 50 m high. (And the final distillation tower is 130 m tall.) I’ve noticed, while checking out this program against various landmarks, that there is an approximately a 10% error associated with this measurement. This seems to be dominated by unlevel ground effects (the shadow terminating on buildings or on a hill side) and problems picking out the right starting point for the. Perhaps surprisingly, this is really difficult! At least if you want to do better than 10%.

There is also something else to note. I’ve started to wonder about some of those dates listed by GoogleEarth. I’m not sure, but I’m beginning to think some of those dates are wrong, or at least don’t apply to some of the scenes they are linked to. However, this seems to be true only for Western cities where there is plenty of coverage and perhaps they aren’t particularly concerned about getting the date right. I’ve checked the program against the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Xichang SLC’s service tower; all of which I know the heights for and I get within +-10%.

I also tried checking it against the St. Louis Gateway Arch but this has proven to be very difficult, either because its difficult to judge the correct spots to measure with a curved arch or, just perhaps, it is the wrong date on GoogleEarth. After all, the date stamp says it’s June, but some of the trees in the area are clearly without leaves. If I use a March date, then I get a reasonable height for the Arch.

By the way, you can see an amusing example of the problems associated with knitting together different scenes if you look at the bridges across the Mississippi just to the East of the Arch; in particular, look at the Martin Luther King Bridge. I’d say it was because the camera “tilt” was different between the two different images while looking at elevated objects, but I’ve seen the same thing on surface roads.

Have fun!

ps It only works with windows, Sorry Mac users!

Comment [8]

I am going to be on a panel that Jill is putting together on Tuesday, December 9, followed by a happy hour.

Here are the details for the event, which will be at the Carnegie Endowment. The happy hour will be at The Big Hunt immediately after.

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

On behalf of Physicians for Social Responsibility, you are invited to “Steps to Zero,” an informative talk on steps the next administration and Congress can take towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons. This will be followed by a small wine and cheese reception.

Date: Tuesday, December 9, 2008, 4:00 to 5:30 p.m.

Location: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036

Speakers: Dr. Edward Ifft, Jenifer Mackby, Sharon Squassoni and Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

This is a forum to learn and discuss these steps to zero with the experts. Speakers and topics to be addressed:

1. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I): Value of START and potential for a new verifiable disarmament treaty with Russia.

Dr. Edward Ifft, Adjunct Professor in the Security Studies Program of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Dr. Ifft is a retired State Department Official who served on the U.S. delegations to the SALT, TTBT, START and CTBT negotiations, was the Senior State Representative to both the START and CTBT negotiations and served as Deputy Chief U.S. Negotiator to START. Dr. Ifft also served as Deputy Director of the On-Site Inspection Agency and Senior Advisor to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

2. Implementation of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)

Jenifer Mackby, fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former senior political affairs officer in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland, where she worked on the negotiations of the CTBT, and served as secretary of the work on verification for the CTBT Organization in Vienna, Austria.

3. Fissile Material Cut off Treaty (FMCT) and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference 2010

Sharon Squassoni, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Congressional Research Service nonproliferation specialist and 9 year safeguards expert in the executive branch, as well as director of Policy Coordination in the Nonproliferation Bureau at the State Department.

4. Commentary: Prospects for Taking these Steps to Zero

Dr. Jeffrey G. Lewis, Director, Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative, New America Foundation. Previously, Dr. Lewis was Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. He is author of Minimum Means of Reprisal: China’s Search for Security in the Nuclear Age (MIT Press, 2007). Dr. Lewis founded and maintains the leading blog on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, ArmsControlWonk.com.

Unfortunately space is limited, so please RSVP by noon Monday December 8. RSVP directly to this email or to jparillo[at]psr.org

This panel discussion is made possible by generous support from the Ford Foundation.

Hope to see you there!

Best Regards,

Jill

Jill Marie Parillo

Deputy Director for Security Programs
and Director of US-Iranian Scientific Exchange Initiative
Physicians for Social Responsibility
1875 Connecticut Avenue, NW; Suite 1012

Comment [1]

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]