The Case for Reductions to 1,000 Warheads

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

Stories we're following today: Thursday  August 26, 2010

Smaller and Safer: A New Plan for Nuclear Postures - Blair, Esin, McKinzie, Yarynich, & Zolotarev in Foreign Affairs [link]

• Under the New START treaty, the United States and Russia remain ready to inflict apocalyptic devastation in a nuclear exchange that would cause millions of casualties and wreak unfathomable environmental ruin.
• The next stage in arms control negotiations should cover all the complex issues of nuclear weapons, including those surrounding both strategic and substrategic (tactical) nuclear weapons, as well as limits on strategic offensive weapons with conventional warheads. A realistic goal would be for the United States and Russia to agree to each have no more than a total of 1,000 strategic and tactical nuclear warheads combined.
• Washington and Moscow could easily reduce their nuclear forces to just 1,000 warheads apiece without any adverse consequences. They could also de-alert their nuclear forces, diminishing the risk of an accidental or unauthorized launch.
• Eventually, in concert with other nuclear states and after progress has been made on missile defense cooperation, they should be able to reduce their arsenals to 500 weapons each. Even after these deep cuts, hundreds of cities would still remain at risk of catastrophic destruction in the event of a nuclear war.
• Open analysis can help inform the public and policymakers and could pave the way toward a safer and more stable world with fewer, and eventually zero, nuclear weapons.

Carter's North Korea Trip was Months in the Making - Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy's The Cable [link]

• Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter landed in North Korea Wednesday, culminating months of closely held discussions about whether and how to send a high-level political figure on a mission to free an American who has been imprisoned in the cloistered East Asian country since January.
• Meanwhile, more details are emerging about last week's high-level meeting on the Obama administration's North Korea policy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in attendance and the meeting was led jointly by Policy Planning chief Anne Marie Slaughter and Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.
• "I think everyone there clearly felt that what has been done so far [by the Obama administration] was the right thing to do, but people were trying to look ahead," one attendee said. "They didn't think doing more of the same is necessarily the right course of action."
• The attendees spanned the ideological spectrum of North Korea hands. Experts in the room included the American Enterprise Institute's Nicholas Eberstadt, former NSC senior director Mike Green, former NSC senior director Victor Cha, the Stimson Center's Alan Romberg, former North Korea intelligence official Robert Carlin, Stanford's Siegfried Hecker, humanitarian Stephen Linton, and former nuclear negotiator Joel Wit.

5 Minutes With Benjamin Netanyahu - Karim Sadjadpour in The Atlantic [link]

• Much has already been written in this forum and elsewhere about the profound inadvisability of a military strike on Iran. Rather than reiterate the arguments, here are five key points that, if I could, I would convey to Bibi Netanyahu
• The decision to attack Iran rests heavily on one's character assessment of the Islamic Republic. While the regime has long shown itself willing to kill its own people, three decades of empirical evidence suggests that its paramount goal is to stay in power, not to achieve collective martyrdom.
• While a successful military strike might delay Iran's nuclear progress by two years, it would likely destroy the most promising democracy movement in the history of the contemporary Middle East and entrench Tehran's most radical elements for years, if not decades, to come.
• While the current debate understandably focuses on the dangers of Iran's nuclear ambitions, historians may well look back years from now and argue that the nuclear program was for the Islamic Republic what the invasion of Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union: a giant albatross that's been a massive burden to the country financially and isolated it politically, with few tangible gains.
• If we could speak to Netanyahu, we would do well to acknowledge this candidly: Simply advocating what has become the most clichéd word in international relations, "engagement," is not to articulate a genuinely "creative form of diplomacy." The latter requires confronting a difficult set of issues -- one the Obama administration is grappling with now.

Bringing Israel's Bomb Out of the Basement - Avner Cohen and Marvin Miller in the New York Times [link]

• Israel neither affirms nor denies its possession of nuclear weapons - a policy of "Opacity".  Indeed, the government refuses to say anything factual about its nuclear activities, and Israeli citizens are encouraged, both by law and by custom, to follow suit....But this policy has now become anachronistic, even counterproductive.
• Israel is now a mature nuclear weapons state, but it finds it difficult under the strictures of opacity to make a convincing case that it is a responsible one. Opacity also prevents Israel from making a convincing case that its nuclear policy is indeed one of defensive last resort and from participating in a meaningful fashion in regional arms control and global disarmament deliberations.
• if Israel takes seriously the need to modify its own nuclear posture and its approach to the peace process, there will likely be stronger international support for measures designed to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold and to contain a nuclear-armed Iran if those efforts fail.
• In order to deal effectively with the new regional nuclear environment and emerging global nuclear norms, Israel must reassess the wisdom of its unwavering commitment to opacity and realize that international support for retaining its military edge, including its nuclear capacity, rests on retaining its moral edge.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen Confident in Iraqi Forces, Concerned about Nuclear Weapons - Chicago Tribune [link]

• While Mullen talked about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said the possibility of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons was the greatest threat to national security.
• "I am, and have been for some time, concerned about the nexus of loose nuclear weapons and terrorists specifically," he said.
• That potential is particularly perilous with al-Qaida, which he said has suffered setbacks since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but is gaining strength in Yemen and North Africa.
• "They're looking for a way to get their hands on a nuclear weapon," Mullen said.