Looking Beyond START

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

Stories we're following today: Thursday January 6, 2011.

Arms Talks Now Turn to Short-Range Weapons - Peter Baker of The New York Times [link]

• Fresh from winning Senate approval for a new strategic arms treaty, President Obama plans to return to the negotiating table with Russia next year in hopes of securing the first legal limits ever imposed on the smaller, battlefield nuclear weapons viewed as most vulnerable to theft or diversion.
• That was always Mr. Obama’s long-stated plan for following up New Start, so now he has the added advantage of a virtual Republican mandate to negotiate a new arms limitation agreement with Russia.
• The challenge next time will actually be Russia, which has many more of these tactical bombs deployed in Europe than the United States does, and in its strategic doctrine deems them critical to defending against a potential conventional attack by NATO or China.
• Today, the United States retains about 500 tactical weapons, according to the figures released this year, and experts say about 180 of them are still stationed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Russia has between 3,000 and 5,000 of them, depending on the estimate.
• Experts warned that it would be hard to persuade Russia to give up its advantage without getting something in return. If not a concession on missile defense, these experts said Russia would certainly want to talk about paring back the large stockpiles of stored strategic weapons that are also not covered by the New Start treaty.
• Steven Pifer [a Ploughshares grantee at the Brookings Institution] said one way to devise a deal would be to negotiate an overall cap on all nuclear weapons of perhaps 2,500 each. Then both sides would have to reduce the weapons they have the most of, but precise parity in each category would not be required.

Offense and Defense After New START - Pavel Podvig in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [link]

• Intended to be a treaty that restores US-Russian arms control, New START also lays the foundation for deeper nuclear reductions -- this is the work that the treaty does quite well…Success [with issues for the next agreement] will depend on whether the United States and Russia find a way around a problem that will quite likely dominate the debate: missile defense.
• The politics of missile defense in the United States is such that further restrictions on the US program would be practically impossible…Russia, on the other hand, is showing no signs of backing down and will probably insist on some tangible limits on missile defense should the United States ask it for concessions on other issues, like tactical nuclear weapons or non-deployed warheads.
• If managed correctly, missile defense is not a threat to the arms control process.
• New START's says, "current strategic defensive arms do not undermine the viability and effectiveness of the strategic offensive arms." The reality of the defense-offense relationship is that this statement will remain true no matter how deeply the United States and Russia cut their nuclear forces: At no point will missile defense be able to pose a serious threat to strategic offensive arsenals.
• Missile defense has always been and will always remain an issue that is quite vulnerable to various political manipulations on both sides. The only way to remove the political posturing from the issue and bring the United States and Russia to an agreement on the real world capabilities of missile defense is to ensure that the two countries closely collaborate in order to understand clearly the limitations of missile defense.

Year in Review: Reducing Global Nuclear Dangers and Improving U.S. Security - Under Secretary of State Ellen Tauscher in "Dipnote" [link]

• Working with Congress and our allies and partners abroad, President Obama has taken the concrete steps necessary to make the world a safer and more secure place.
• The Senate approved the New START Treaty, which will establish lower limits on deployed strategic warheads and delivery vehicles, by a 71 to 26 vote.
• Last Spring, President Obama issued a new Nuclear Posture Review and hosted nearly 50 world leaders in Washington, D.C., as part of the unprecedented Nuclear Security Summit to secure global stockpiles of fissile material and prevent nuclear terrorism.
• At the NPT Review Conference, the United States worked with its allies and partners to reaffirm the world's commitment to the nonproliferation regime.
• There is more work ahead of us. The United States will seek further nuclear reductions with Russia, including on non-deployed and non-strategic nuclear weapons. Our "to do" list also includes pursuing ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to end nuclear testing, negotiating an FMCT, and following through on the action plans from both the NPT Review Conference and the Nuclear Security Summit.
• I am proud of the progress we made this year and look forward to building on our momentum in 2011.

Realism, Not Softening, Seen in U.S.-North Korea Moves - Paul Eckert in Reuters [link]

• Negotiating with North Korea has never been easy, pleasant or even particularly productive, but a series of hostile actions by Pyongyang and evidence it is advancing its nuclear weapons program seems to have driven home to Washington that not talking to the North can be even worse.
• The U.S. envoy for North Korea policy said on Tuesday he hoped serious negotiations over Pyongyang's nuclear programs could start soon after a two-year stalemate.
• Ambassador Stephen Bosworth's comments in Seoul followed New Year remarks by both North and South Korea that suggested a willingness to talk. Japan said it also wants to discuss the nuclear problem and other bilateral issues with the North.
• "Nothing can be solved or resolved, nor can tensions be reduced, without dialogue with the North Koreans," said Charles "Jack" Pritchard, a former U.S. negotiator with North Korea who now heads the Korea Economic Institute in Washington.
• "The North Koreans have no intention of giving up their nuclear weapons programs any time soon, so you have to accept the six-party talks for what it is: another channel of communication with the North Koreans," he said.
• The United States, which will host Chinese President Hu Jintao for a key state visit in late January, needs to keep a "reasonable amount of pressure" on the Chinese to ensure that Beijing is enforcing United Nations sanctions imposed to stop nuclear proliferation by North Korea, said Pritchard.

The Unexpected Return of 'Duck and Cover' - Glenn Harlan Reynolds for The Atlantic [link]

• Sixty years ago, in 1951, Ray Maurer and Anthony Rizzo produced a film for the federal government's Civil Defense agency in response to Soviet nuclear tests. Featuring an animated turtle named Bert and real-life schoolchildren from New York, the film, Duck and Cover, became an icon of the Cold War.
• But now "duck and cover" is back, not as kitsch but once again as serious advice from the federal government.
• aced with growing concerns about a nuclear attack on one or more major cities -- this time from terrorists, or bombs smuggled instead of dropped by countries like Iran or North Korea -- authorities are once again looking to educate citizens about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. And that advice sounds a lot like what they were saying in my grandfather's day: Duck and cover.
• As outlined in a lengthy planning document developed by a federal interagency committee led by the Executive Office of the President and released last summer, national and especially local authorities should be making plans to educate people to take cover and shelter in place after a nuclear detonation.
• An atomic explosion can blind you, burn you, crush you with explosive power, or poison you with radiation. The "duck and cover" advice, based in no small part on the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, was designed to do what could be done to minimize that.
• A terrorist bomb is likely to be relatively small -- possibly only a fraction of the Hiroshima bomb's explosive power -- and likely exploded at ground level…Because of this, Homeland Security people in the Obama Administration have been encouraging a duck-and-cover approach, followed by advice to "shelter in place" against fallout rather than trying to evacuate the area.
• Encouraging people to take even modest steps to prepare themselves in advance will undoubtedly save lives, even if the terrorist attack never comes and Washington is, instead, struck by an asteroid, an earthquake, or a hurricane.

The Lighter Side

Nuclear Bomb Detonates During Rehearsal For 'Spider-Man' Musical - The Onion [link]

• In yet another setback for the $65 million dollar Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark—a production plagued by multiple delays, poor early reviews, and severe injuries to its cast and crew—a thermonuclear device detonated during the first act of Tuesday night's preview performance.
• "The bomb should not have gone off at all," said lead producer Michael Cohl, adding that the explosion that vaporized most of Manhattan was "not that unusual" for a major Broadway show still in development.
• "Spider-Man is supposed to swing down to the stage and deactivate a nuclear bomb, but his wires got tangled up, and by the time he got there and remembered the disarm code, it was too late.
• We're going to hire two more stagehands to make sure this doesn't happen again."