Obama's National Security Strategy Focuses on Managing Threats

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

Stories we're following today, Friday, May 28, 2010: 

 New U.S. Strategy Focuses on Managing Threats - New York Times [link]

• President Obama’s first formal national security strategy describes a coming era in which the United States will have to learn to live within its limits — a world in which two wars cannot be sustained for much longer and the rising powers inevitably begin to erode some elements of American influence around the globe.
• “We are no less powerful,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday at the Brookings Institution. “We are shifting from mostly direct application and exercise of American power,” she said, to one of indirection, that requires patience and partners, and gets results more slowly. “In a world like this, American leadership isn’t needed less,” she said. “It is needed more. And the simple fact is that no global problem can be solved without us.”
• [Obama] goes on to argue that “the gravest danger to the American people and global security continues to come from weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons.”
• To read President Obama's National Security Strategy, please click here.

A Better National Security Strategy for Stopping Iran - Joe Cirincione in the Huffington Post [link]

• In 2003, Iran did not have any centrifuges spinning and had not enriched even a gram of uranium. By February 2009, as President Obama started his first full month in office, Iran had 5,412 centrifuges installed at its facility in Natanz, with plans to increase to 54,000, and had produced an estimated 1000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium.
• Iran's nuclear program advanced more in the last 5 years of the Bush Administration than it had in the previous 15 years.
• The 2010 National Security Strategy argues, instead:

Many years of refusing to engage Iran failed to reverse these trends; on the contrary, Iran's behavior became more threatening. Engagement is something we pursue without illusion. It can offer Iran a pathway to a better future, provided Iran's leaders are prepared to take it. But that better pathway can only be achieved if Iran's leaders change course, act to restore the confidence of the international community, and fulfill their obligations. The United States seeks a future in which Iran meets its international responsibilities, takes its rightful place in the community of nations, and enjoys the political and economic opportunities that its people deserve. Yet if the Iranian Government continues to refuse to live up to its international obligations, it will face greater isolation.

• The process is working. Iran has not been stopped, but as Vice-President Joe Biden says, the regime is more isolated internally, regionally and internationally than it has ever been. 

Truth or Consequences for Missile Defense - George Lewis and Theodore Postol in the Boston Globe [link]

• During the past few weeks the Pentagon has been making claims about the success of a missile defense system called the Standard Missile 3. But our analysis of the Pentagon’s own publicly available test data showed that instead of being the highly capable defense-system described by the Pentagon, the SM-3 was barely working, failing to destroy target warheads in eight to nine of 10 tests that were reported by the Pentagon as successes.
• President Obama, who once expressed doubts about the effectiveness of missile defenses, described the SM-3 as a “proven and reliable’’ centerpiece of a new missile defense program he announced last year. We believe that the president was misled by the Pentagon.
• These claims had other serious consequences for the security of the United States and its allies. The misconception about the potential role of missile defense now permeates the Nuclear Posture Review, which had to be delayed and revised before it was issued recently.
• The NPR is an important doctrinal description of how the United States hopes to achieve nuclear arms reductions and to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Due to possible Pentagon misrepresentations of missile-defense test data, the NPR incorrectly assumes that existing missile defenses are so robust and reliable that they can actually be used to compensate for losses in our deterrent posture that would supposedly occur with reductions in nuclear weapons. Furthermore, if the United States and its allies make plans to depend upon missile defenses that don’t work, it could ultimately have enormous consequences for our mutual security.
• The White House and Congress should investigate this relentless pattern of misrepresentations about the true capabilities of ballistic missile defense systems.

In Playing Politics On START, Right Threatens To Permanently Damage American Diplomacy - Max Bergmann in the Wonk Room [link]

• The right wing is flailing about in search of an argument to make against the START treaty. Finding few, they have resorted to the same obstructionist tactics used to slow down the process on other big issues such as health care. Their latest effort is to demand that the Obama administration release the negotiating record.
• Kim Holmes of the Heritage Foundation and formerly of the Bush administration writes in the Washington Times: "Several senators are asking to see the secret negotiating record from the administration’s official talks with Russia. Why? Because U.S. and Russian officials publicly disagree about what the treaty says… Furthermore, there are reports that U.S. negotiators actually told the Russians that the U.S. had no intention of putting strategic missile defenses in Europe."
• First off there are no “reports” – there is unsubstantiated conspiratorial gossip from American right wingers about some “secret deal.” These accusations are absurd. 
• Furthermore, negotiating records are not released for a reason. Releasing the record would set a horrible precedent and would create a terrible chilling effect on future treaty negotiations. As a result, American presidents have been refusing to release treaty negotiating records since George Washington – who rejected a request from the first congress. 

Interactive Friday

Twelve Events That Will Change Everything - Scientific American [link]

Nuclear Exchange

• Global effects, however, would not happen unless dozens of bombs exploded, as might occur in an exchange between Pakistan and India.  
• Aside from 20 million killed in the war, many outside the conflict would perish over time.  That is because the blasts would throw up five million metric tons of soot into the upper atmosphere.  Drive by weather patterns, the particulates would encircle the globe in about a week; within two months they would blanket the planet.  Darkened skies would rob plants of sunlight and disrupt the food chain for 10 years.  The resulting famine could kill the one billion people who now survive on marginal food supplies.
• The outcome is grim.  But there is one bright spot: it is within humanity's ability - and responsibility - to see that such a world-changing event never happens.