European Leaders Say NATO Nuclear Weapons Not Needed to Defend Europe

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:

NATO and the Nuclear Umbrella - Wolfgang Ischinger and Ulrich Weisser in the International Herald Tribune [link]

• It is against this background that we should pursue a double track policy — redefining nuclear deterrence and the needed capabilities, and developing a concept for nuclear arms control which reflects current political objectives and strategic realities. 
• The likelihood that political leaders in Bejing or Moscow would launch a surprise nuclear attack on the United States and her allies is close to zero. This assessment is also the basis for current efforts to significantly reduce American and Russian strategic nuclear weapons. In this context, sub-strategic nuclear weapons in Europe lose their purpose and should become subject to serious arms control initiatives. 
• As the United States and Russia commit themselves to nonproliferation, a proposal by European NATO members to reduce and withdraw tactical nuclear weapons would be an important contribution to broadening this bilateral effort to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world.

Gerecht, Ignatius: Iran Engagement Has Worked - Matt Duss in the Wonk Room [link]

• Obviously, the Green movement is not Obama’s doing, it belongs to the people of Iran. But his approach has clearly had an effect.
• Far more than Bush’s belligerent speechmaking and Cheney’s refusal to “negotiate with evil,” Obama’s outreach has placed the onus squarely on the Iranian government, and put them in a more difficult position both in regard to Iranian domestic politics and the international community’s demands on Iran’s nuclear program.
• In his column yesterday, David Ignatius explored this dynamic a bit more fully, writing that “White House officials argue that their strategy of engagement has been a form of pressure, and the evidence supports them.”
• Writes Ignatius: "Obama’s outstretched hand makes sense because it subverts Iran’s best propaganda weapon. Without the Great Satan to blame, the Iranians have been accident-prone. Recall the diplomats’ admonition: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” That argues for a continued open door to Iran."

Clinton Raises U.S Concerns of Military Power in Iran - New York Times [link]

• The United States fears that Iran is drifting toward a military dictatorship, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps seizing control of large swaths of Iran’s political, military and economic establishment.
• Her blunt comments carried particular resonance because of where they were delivered, in Qatar, a Persian Gulf emirate with close ties to Iran, and later in the day, in Saudi Arabia. But they built on the administration’s strategy of branding the Revolutionary Guards as an “entitled class” that is the principal culprit behind Iran’s nuclear proliferation and political repression.
• The United States is tailoring a new set of stricter United Nations sanctions aimed at the Revolutionary Guards, which Mrs. Clinton said had accelerated its marginalization of religious and political leaders since the Iranian presidential elections in June.
  
  

Dick Cheney Is Right; So Is Joe Biden - Joe Cirincione in the Huffington Post [link]

• Former Vice President Dick Cheney says the number one threat to America is nuclear terrorism. He is right. And Joe Biden has the plan for how to prevent it.
• Biden will elaborate the administration's efforts to prevent any nuclear catastrophe -- from terrorists, from new nuclear-armed states, and from use of the current 23,000 nuclear weapons -- in a speech on February 18 in Washington.
• There is a bipartisan consensus that we must fight this threat with a dual-track strategy: defeat the terrorist networks and prevent terrorists from getting nuclear materials.
• But securing all these materials requires the cooperation of dozens of nations. You can't get that help without making preventing nuclear terrorism part of the broader agenda that other nations desire. President Obama reaffirmed at the Global Zero summit in Paris on February 2 that the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons "is one of my top priorities."

TED 2010: Nuclear Proliferation Is This Year's Inconvenient Truth - Wired [link]

• In 2006, Oleg Khinsagov was caught trying to smuggle 100 grams of refined uranium into Georgia with the aim of selling it to a Muslim man whom he believed was connected to “a serious organization.”
• That should be the opening scene of a new documentary on nuclear proliferation, but instead it’s tucked into the middle of Countdown to Zero, which aims to do for anti-nuclear proliferation what An Inconvenient Truth did for the environmental movement. The film takes a while to work up to its most important point — that anyone with a relatively small amount of money has the ability to obtain enough nuclear weapons material to incinerate everything in a five-mile radius of a large city. And they wouldn’t have to missile it into the U.S., they could simply detonate it in a container ship at a port.
• Earlier in the day, former CIA covert operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who is featured in the film and was at the screening, told the TED audience that during her time in the CIA her main focus was on preventing terrorist groups from obtaining nuclear materials and weapons. But now she believes the greatest threat comes from Pakistan, which is politically precarious and believed to be the current home of Osama bin Laden.

A View from the Dark Side

Nuclear Iran - Washington Times Editorial [link]

• Iran has emerged as a nuclear state, and there is nothing the United States can do about it.
• There is a reason that highly enriched uranium is called "weapons-grade," and it has nothing to do with peaceful uses of nuclear power. It is a measure of Western impotence that the United States went to war with Iraq in 2003 to prevent the very things Iran is announcing with pride in 2010.
• The United States should begin planning for the inevitable. Conflict is coming; it won't be managed away.