Practical Proposals on NATO Missile Defenses and Nuclear Policy

On the radar: Cooperate instead of agitate; Changing NATO’s nuclear policy; Invest in troops, not nukes; Nuke spending in the House; Cartwright’s doctrinal shift; Senators clash over Iran policy; a Nuke by any other name; Senate divided on East Coast site; Preserving the consensus on Iran; House moves the redline; Graphing reductions; and What is going on in this picture?

May 18, 2012 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke and Mary Kaszynski

Yes to missile defense, with Russia - Rather than moving forward with missile defense plans at the Chicago summit, NATO leaders should focus on working out BMD cooperation with Russia, writes Wolfgang Ischinger in The New York Times. http://owl.li/b06bn

NATO’s nuclear policy - 45 European leaders, from former UK Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind to Volker Rühe, former Defence Minister of Germany, are calling for a change in NATO nuclear policy at Chicago.

--Among their recommendations: recommit to a world without nuclear weapons, change NATO’s declaratory policy to state that the fundamental role of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack, and announce an immediate reduction of 50 percent in the total number of US non-strategic nuclear weapons stationed in Europe. http://owl.li/b069s

NATO-Russia cooperation - For cooperative missile defense to come to fruition, NATO and Russia will have to focus on real technical threats and responses. There are ways to make NATO more secure and address Russian concerns with missile defense cooperation. This also may be more possible than the rhetoric suggests, write Barzashka, Kadyshev, Neuneck and Oelrich in The New York Times. http://owl.li/b067G

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A bad security investment - “Cutting funding for nuclear programs will save the taxpayers money, and make it easier to redirect funds from outdated Cold War weapons to the training and equipment our troops need to face 21st Century threats.” Major General Roger Blunt, a civil and nuclear engineer, in The Hill. http://owl.li/b065s

HASC vs. HAC - House authorizers have been much more generous to the nuclear complex than House appropriators, adding millions to the administration request for nuclear weapons and missile defense projects. Kingston Reif has the details. http://owl.li/b063P

Tweet - Joe @Cirincione: Rep. Dicks just threw ICBM fleet under the bus. If Markey wants to cut, he said, "why doesn't he look at our long-range missiles?"

Ditching counterforce - For decades U.S. nuclear posture has been oriented toward fighting and winning a nuclear war - requiring large arsenals and rapid launch capabilities. A recent report from Global Zero, chaired by Gen. James Cartwright, that recommends limiting the U.S. strategic arsenal to several hundred would effectively shift U.S. policy from “counterforce” to “countervalue” strategies, writes Peter Scoblic at Foreign Policy.

--This would be a difficult and big change but is the right call, argues Scoblic. “There is no conceivable situation in which American interests would be served by a preemptive nuclear attack using more than 1,000 weapons.” http://owl.li/b061u

--EW editors congratulate Peter Scoblic on his new position as executive editor at Foreign Policy. Scoblic recently served as deputy staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, before that, was a Ploughshares Fund grantee.

Sanctions debate in the Senate - Senate Republicans called for more time to examine the bill for new Iran sanctions, clashing with Democrats who wanted to pass the bill yesterday. Points of contention include a sentence added to the bill Wednesday saying the resolution is not authorization for military force, and a suggestion that the bill be amended to say the military option is still on the table.

--Senators from both sides of the aisle say the bill is still expected to pass, but the timeline is unclear, Reuters reports. http://owl.li/b05Z2

What makes a nuke tactical? - In Chicago, NATO is likely to discuss paths forward for reducing the U.S. and Russian stockpiles of “tactical nuclear weapons.” One significant obstacle to such reductions is figuring out what counts as “tactical.” Your humble EW editor in The Bulletin argues that the U.S. and Russia should drop the “tactical” distinction and instead limit total numbers of nuclear warheads. http://owl.li/b05WV

Tough sell in the Senate - The House proposal for a missile defense shield on the East Coast may face opposition in the Senate, Jen DiMascio reports for Aviation Week. SASC strategic forces ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) supports the idea, but strategic forces chair Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) questions the shield’s necessity, feasibility, and cost. http://owl.li/b05Ug

Preserving the international coalition - “The U.S. should work harder at mending fences with Russia and China to keep them onboard,” Vali Nasr writes in Bloomberg. “Otherwise, Iran will have no reason to resolve the nuclear issue.” http://owl.li/b05Rb

“Capability” - A House resolution approved yesterday moves the U.S. redline to Iran’s obtaining a “nuclear weapons capability” - an ambiguous phrase that could open the door for a preemptive strike. From The CS Monitor. http://owl.li/b05OC

Shrinking bar charts - The U.S. cut its nuclear arsenal by 50% over the last decade, and pending presidential decisions could continue eliminating the excess from the Cold War nuclear stockpile. Peter Fedewa on the Ploughshares Fund blog charts the arsenal by year, arguing that a smaller arsenal makes more sense for 21st century strategic and budgetary needs. http://owl.li/b05L1

The Dancer & the bomb - Alex Wellerstein stumbled across an official government photo of a dancer posing with a nuclear blast in the background, taken at the Nevada Test Site in 1953. Why? Who knows. http://owl.li/b05Iz