2010 Shaping Up as Pivotal Year in Arms Control

We are happy to serve you a daily summary of the day's top nuclear policy stories each morning, with excerpts from the stories in bullet form.  

Stories we're following today:

2010 To Be Key Year in Fight Against Nuclear Arms - Reuters [link]

• Next year will be crucial for global nuclear non-proliferation efforts and all eyes will be on the United States and Russia to see if the two top atomic powers can reach a deal to reduce their arsenals.
• Analysts and Western government officials say Obama's ability to begin delivering on his promise will be tested next year when Moscow and Washington resume haggling on an arms reduction pact and again at a key U.N. nuclear arms conference in May.
• They say success of a month-long review of the troubled 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will depend largely on whether U.S. and Russian negotiators can first agree on a successor pact to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

Obama Presses Review of Nuclear Strategy - Boston Globe [link]

• In a thorough review expected to be completed early this year, the size, structure, and even the very mission of America’s nuclear arsenal are being reconsidered as part of President Obama’s pledge to reduce the role of the world’s most deadly weapons.
• The review is shaping up to be a major showdown for Obama this year. It is taking on some of the most sacred cows of the nuclear program. For the first time, influential voices, including a former top nuclear commander and senior Obama advisers, are proposing that one leg of the nuclear arms “triad’’ - a $30 billion-a-year enterprise made up of land-, air-, and sea-based weapons - be eliminated.
• Another historic change under consideration is adopting a “no-first-use’’ policy, a public declaration stating the United States would not use nuclear weapons first, a step long advocated by arms control advocates who believe it would reduce the incentive for other nations to develop nuclear weapons.
• Also on the table, the officials say, is explicitly limiting the nuclear arsenal’s mission to deterring other nuclear weapons - not chemical or biological attacks or halting a massive conventional military assault, as current policy stipulates.
• “The US-Soviet standoff that gave rise to tens of thousands of nuclear weapons is over, but the policies developed to justify their possession and potential use remain largely the same,’’ said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington think tank and leading advocate of disarmament. 

U.S. Sees an Opportunity to Press Iran on Nuclear Fuel - New York Times [link]

• As President Obama faces pressure to back up his year-end ultimatum for diplomatic progress with Iran, the administration says that domestic unrest and signs of unexpected trouble in Tehran’s nuclear program make its leaders particularly vulnerable to strong and immediate new sanctions.
• The long-discussed sanctions would initiate the latest phase in a strategy to force Iran to comply with United Nations demands to halt production of nuclear fuel. 
• While outsiders have a limited view of Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration officials said they believed that the bomb-development effort was seriously derailed by the exposure three months ago of the country’s secret enrichment plant under construction near the holy city of Qum. Exposure of the site deprived Iran of its best chance of covertly producing the highly enriched uranium needed to make fuel for nuclear weapons.
• “For now, the Iranians don’t have a credible breakout option, and we don’t think they will have one for at least 18 months, maybe two or three years,” said one senior administration official at the center of the White House Iran strategy.

Despite Challenges in 2009, Progress on Proliferation - NPR [link]

• But seen through the prism of history, the state of nuclear proliferation may not be all that dire.
• "One way to look at it a little differently is not that the regime is cracking or that the regime is failing, but that the regime has succeeded in retarding the pace of proliferation and continues to do so, but isn't going to catch everything," Joshua Pollack says.
• Since the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, the past decade has seen the fewest nuclear tests of any comparable period, notes Michael Krepon, president emeritus of the Stimson Center in Washington.
• There is much to be optimistic about, says Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a grant-making foundation that funds initiatives to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons. "The overall climate is so much improved, and the overall effort to just dramatically reduce nuclear weapons and increase the transparency gives us lots of assurances," he says.
• Listen to the NPR story below:

Stephen Colbert's Secret Plan to Defend America - Joe Cirincione in the Huffington Post [link]

• Stephen Colbert's plan to string a microscopically thin razor along our entire border is brutal, indiscriminate, dangerous... and smarter than the nuclear defense we now have.
• Both the Colbert strategy and the current U.S. nuclear strategy are insane. Both are immoral, expensive, and dangerous to American security. At least the dreamt-up Colbert strategy would kill a lot less innocent people.
• This is why a growing bipartisan group of national security experts see nuclear weapons as a security liability, not an asset.
• Stephen should now harness the power of the Colbert Nation to put nuclear weapons on notice. He should list nukes on his "On Notice Board" alongside such malicious forces as grizzly bears and, arguably, above Canadian Iceholes. Bring this threat down.

A View from the Dark Side

Global Threats - John Bolton in the Washington Times [link]

• Too often, Mr. Obama seems either uninterested in the global threats we face, unpersuaded that they constitute dangers to the country, or content simply to blame his predecessors.
• Iran and North Korea, the two gravest nuclear proliferation threats, have so far spurned Mr. Obama's "open hand." 
• In fact, neither Iran nor North Korea will be negotiated out of the nuclear weapons programs (or their chemical or biological weapons, which are not even on the horizon for discussion). Moreover, we cannot be content merely trying to "contain" nuclear rogue states, since so doing simply leaves the initiative entirely with them, given their asymmetric advantage of threatening or actually using their weapons. These countries, each for its own peculiar reasons, are not subject to the Cold War deterrence principals. 
• Instead, Mr. Obama is negotiating drastic nuclear weapons reductions with Russia, even as he eviscerates our missile defense capabilities, apparently believing unilateral strategic arms cutbacks will entrance Moscow and persuade rogue proliferators to dismantle their programs.