50 U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles Go Offline Due to Engineering Failure

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today: Wednesday October 27, 2010.

Failure Shuts Down Squadron of Nuclear Missiles - Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic [link]

• President Obama was briefed this morning on an engineering failure at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming that took 50 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), one-ninth of the U.S. missile stockpile, temporarily offline on Saturday.
• On Saturday morning, according to people briefed on what happened, a squadron of ICBMs suddenly dropped down into what's known as "LF Down" status, meaning that the missileers in their bunkers could no longer communicate with the missiles themselves. LF Down status also means that various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline.
• Commanders at the Air Force Base sent warning notices to colleagues at the country's two other nuclear missile command centers, as well as the to the National Military Command Center in Washington. At that point, they did not know what was causing the failure, and they did not know whether other missile systems were experiencing similar symptoms.
• the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, was immediately notified on Saturday, and he, in turn, briefed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
• It is next to impossible for these systems to be hacked, so the military does not believe the incident was caused by malicious actors. A half dozen individual silos were affected by Saturday's failure.
• In 2008, Gates fired the Secretary of the Air Force and its chief of staff after a series of incidents suggested to Gates that the service wasn't taking its nuclear duties seriously enough. At one point, a B-52 bomber flew across the continental U.S. without realizing that its nuclear weapons were "hot."

U.S. Tries Restart of Talks With Iran - Jay Solomon of The Wall Street Journal [link]

• The Obama administration is pushing to revive a failed deal for Iran to send some of its nuclear stockpile overseas in exchange for assistance with peaceful nuclear technology, according to senior U.S. officials. The aim is to try to reduce Tehran's ability to quickly produce an atomic weapon.
• The U.S. is accelerating its efforts to present Iran with a new offer as part of broader talks on Iran's nuclear program planned for Vienna next month, according to three officials briefed on the diplomacy. Such a meeting would mark the first direct negotiation between U.S. and Iranian officials on the nuclear issue in more than a year.
• Any revised approach would have to address the deficiencies that the U.S. and other P5+1 countries have pointed out in the proposal made by Iran, Turkey, and Brazil in May," said a senior U.S. official involved in the diplomacy.
• Other formulas continue to be discussed to secure a larger amount of Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium, according to the three officials briefed on the diplomacy…The U.S. and its negotiating partners have also discussed allowing Iran to store its stockpile of low-enriched uranium in another country, such as Turkey.
• The U.S. and its allies hope to meet with Iranian officials November 15-17 to discuss both the fuel-swap arrangement and broader international concerns over Iran's nuclear program.

November for New START? - Bill Hartung in Talking Points Memo [link]

• When Congress returns to work after the November 2nd elections, it is imperative that it consider and ratify the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).
• To do otherwise would jeopardize the possibility of progress on a wide range of issues, from global nuclear arms reductions to U.S.-Russian relations to efforts to curb the nuclear weapons programs of Iran and North Korea.
• Without New START the United States and Russia will continue to be without the kind of on site, detailed monitoring of each other's nuclear arsenals that existed under the prior START treaty, which expired in December 2009. As Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana has noted, "Rejecting this treaty would inhibit our knowledge of Russian military capabilities, weaken our nonproliferation diplomacy worldwide, and potentially reignite an expensive arms competition that would further strain our national budget."
• This is a high price to pay for blocking a sensible, modest agreement that would cut existing U.S. and Russian arsenals by about one-third while restoring the mutual verification measures referenced above.
• The case for the treaty has been amply made. It is time for New START skeptics to put aside partisan concerns and ratify the treaty for the good of the country.

Turkish Dilemma On NATO Shield - Marc Champion of The Wall Street Journal [link]

• Turkey's top security body is set to discuss Wednesday whether to back a U.S.-led plan to build a missile-defense shield against rogue states—a moment that could force Ankara to choose between its longstanding westward orientation and its recent courtship of Iran.
• A senior Turkish diplomat said Ankara will have to decide its position before next month's summit of the 28-nation alliance in Lisbon, where Turkey and other NATO members are due to decide whether to go ahead with the plan.
• Both U.S. and Turkish leaders say no decision has yet been made as to which countries will host the forward radar element of the system. Romania and Poland are expected to host land-based missiles when these are deployed, following the initial sea-launched version of the system. But Turkey, which shares a border with Iran, is the location of choice for the plan's forward radar, according to military analysts and diplomats.
• According to diplomats familiar with the matter, Turkey is asking that NATO not name any specific country as the source of a missile-attack threat.
• "No decisions have been made yet," said the senior Turkish diplomat.

How Many Nuclear Weapons Does the U.S. Government Need? - Lawrence Wittner in Huntington News [link]

• A good case can be made that the U.S. government, the first to develop nuclear weapons, would be much better off today without them…even if they do provide a deterrent to a nuclear attack, how many are needed for this purpose?
• Based on a Strategic Defense and Security Review, Britain's new Conservative-headed government decided this October to cut its stockpile of nuclear warheads by 25 percent, reducing it from 225 to 180. Can 180 nuclear warheads create enough mass destruction and chaos to deter a nuclear aggressor?
• Even assuming the logic of nuclear deterrence, do they really need arsenals of this magnitude? With its 9,600 nuclear warheads, for example, the U.S. government could instantly massacre 2.88 billion people and leave most of the rest slowly dying in a nuclear wasteland. Isn't this a bit ... excessive?
• Not surprisingly, then, as even U.S. military planners agree, there's a good deal of room for dramatic cutbacks in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Earlier this year, Colonel B. Chance Saltzman, chief of the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Plans and Policy Division, argued that "the United States could address military utility concerns with only 311 nuclear weapons in its nuclear force structure while maintaining a stable deterrence."
• Overall, then, it appears that the U.S. government's desire for nuclear weapons far outruns its need for them—even by the logic of nuclear deterrence.

The Lighter Side

Shortly after 50 ICBMs at Warren AFB went haywire, Presidents Barack Obama and Dimitri Medvedev had the following conversation. [Hat Tip Abu Muqawama]