Call for Bold Presidential Initiatives to Continue Nuclear Reductions

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

Stories we're following today - Thursday, April 21, 2011:

Got nukes? Be bold - David Hoffman for Foreign Policy [link] 

• Here’s a chance for President Barack Obama to take a lasting step toward his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. It’s time for both countries to get rid of these excess warheads.
• [Treaty] negotiations could take years...Should we wait until 2012 or beyond--when new presidential terms are underway--for the next round of nuclear reductions?
• Both Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev could do something bolder, and sooner. Both countries could agree this year to consign to the scrapheap a large number of non-deployed strategic warheads...
• Might this September be a good time for a new Presidential Nuclear Initiative? Are our presidents bold enough?

Time for Plan B - The New York Times [link]

• A 14-year effort to negotiate an international treaty banning the production of nuclear weapons fuel is getting nowhere...Pakistan, which is racing to develop the world’s fifth largest arsenal, is refusing to let the talks move forward.
• It is clearly time for a new approach. So we are encouraged that the Obama administration has begun discussing with Britain and France and others the possibility of negotiating a ban outside the conference, much like the 2008 convention on cluster munitions and the 1997 land-mine treaty.
• Russia and China, which must be part of any fissile material ban, are resisting the idea of ad hoc negotiations. They should tell Pakistan to let the conference do its job, or they should accept the alternative.

Trapped in ‘Residual Nuclear Deterrence' - Bruce Blair for Time [link]

• Has anyone else been wondering why our vast nuclear forces are largely escaping unscathed from the budgetary axe falling on other defense programs? The justification, as put to me this week by a top Pentagon official, is that we still need to maintain ‘residual deterrence' in our relations with Russia.
• The young ‘z generation' launch officers in the silos today harbor doubts about all this. These ‘millennials' came of age after the end of the Cold War, when nuclear proliferation and terrorism have loomed far more menacing than Russia, and it's a bit puzzling to them that their crowd pleaser all-out exchange is almost always with a country they never really thought of as an enemy.
• While presidents talk of Global Zero, must generals be incurably fated to fight their country's last wars, including the Cold one? Must inertia keep two huge nuclear arsenals locked in mutually reinforcing hair-trigger alert? ‘Residual deterrence' is the residue of minds trapped in the past.

The Defense Build-Down Is Here - Gordon Adams for Time [link]

• President Obama's latest announcement that he intends to seek $400 billion in reductions from his current security funding plans between FY 2012 and 2023 is only the latest signal that a defense build-down is under way.
• What's more, the President's announcement made it clear that he was talking about “security spending,” which includes diplomacy, foreign assistance, nuclear weapons (Energy Department), veterans affairs and homeland security, as well as defense.
• [We can manage a build down,] much deeper than President Obama has suggested, and leave in place a globally dominant military capability. But it will take planning. The next Secretary of Defense will have a tall order.

EVENT: Arms Control Association Annual Meeting - Reducing the Nuclear Danger: Next Steps on the Test Ban Treaty and Nuclear Arms Reductions [link]

• Tuesday, May 10, 2011, 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Root Room
• 1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, D.C.

View from the Dark Side

Trusting the Russians on Missiles an Awful Idea - Clifford May for The Ventura County Star [link]

• Were there an award for the worst idea produced in Washington in recent days...I think I'd put my money on this one: Granting Russians the power to tell Americans whether we can or cannot shoot down missiles flying toward their intended victims.
• Who would even consider such an idea? The Obama administration — or so it appears. In response, last week, 39 Republican senators sent the president a strongly worded letter requesting his assurance, in writing, that he will not give Russia such "red-button" rights.
• Russia is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to its enemies — America, the "Great Satan" tops that list — while simultaneously "insisting" the U.S. give Russian officials the power to decide whether Americans can defend themselves and their allies from Iranian attacks.
• If President Obama sees such ideas as ludicrous, if this is not where he's heading, he should say so. A brief letter would do. At least 39 senators will be anxiously checking their mailboxes.