Nuclear Stars Align Through "Hard-to-Refuse Steps"

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:

Nuclear Stars Move Towards Benign Alignment - Financial Times [link]

• The Cold War may be over but the doctrine of deterrence it spawned is very much alive, with a huge number of warheads on dangerously high alert, with very short decision-making fuses. The good news is that the nuclear stars may be moving into benign alignment, bringing the three goals of non-proliferation, security and disarmament at least into the right orbit.
• The International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament charts a tactically astute path towards hard-to-achieve goals via hard-to-refuse steps. The Global Zero summit that ends on Thursday in Paris calls for a four-stage reduction to zero nukes by 2030. These hard-nosed programmes have been given a kick-start by START.
• In April, the US hosts a nuclear security summit in Washington for more than 40 national leaders. Its main aim will be to secure all nuclear material worldwide within four years. If the main strategic threats are jihadist ultra-terrorism and nuclear proliferation – and their chillingly possible intersection – then hoovering up “loose nukes” is a strategic imperative.
• It also helps create confidence to push towards zero nukes. “A nuclear security summit helps to replace the Hobbesian strategic outlook by helping to create the notion of nuclear order,” argues Joe Cirincione, the US non-proliferation expert.

Nuclear Arms Will Soon Proliferate. So Here’s a Plan to Scrap them All. - Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian [link]

• 'Peaceniks" is not the word that immediately comes to mind as you contemplate this array of smartly dressed present and former presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, generals and ambassadors, their neat if thinning coiffures reflected in the gilded mirrors of an ornate hall in one of Paris's grand hotels. Yet they have come together to advance a goal as ambitious as any ponytailed peaceniks ever had: the total, worldwide elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2030. Global zero.
• I have signed up to support this goal, as you can at www.globalzero.org, but we have to acknowledge that the obstacles along the road to zero are enormous.
• The big issue is what happens in 2010. This May sees a major conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Article 6 of that treaty commits signatories to work towards the reduction and eventual elimination of their nuclear weapons.
• What matters is the direction of travel. To decide which way you're heading, it does usually help to identify a final destination. At the moment – let us be very clear – the world is going in the opposite direction. We are close to a nuclear proliferation tipping point.
• So we need less of L'Inflexible and more of l'inspiration.

Nonproliferation Budget Increases Dramatically - Marc Ambinder in the Atlantic Politics Channel [link]

• Lost in the hullabaloo over the administration's commitment to spend $5 billion over 5 years on managing and modernizing the nuclear stockpile are significant budget increases for nonproliferation activities. The total request for the 2011 fiscal year is $2.7 billion, up nearly a quarter -- or $551 million from the past year.
• The United States's National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) has the largest nonproliferation budget in the world. Programs include the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which saw its budget increase by 67%. This money pays for the multi-agency teams that travel around the world securing loose nuclear material and shipping it back to the U.S. or to Russia. These are the front-line warriors in the nonproliferation game -- the "white" ops part of it.
• Today, a group of 40 nuclear security experts called on Congress to fund the nonproliferation programs. Ken Luongo, the chair of the Fissile Materials Working Group, praised the administration's budget increase request.

Obsession with Nuclear Deterrent Doesn't Add Up - Matt Rojansky in Across the Aisle: The PSA Blog [link]

• Unfortunately, a focus on the conventional logic of deterrence doesn’t fit in a world where the most urgent threats to US national security are posed by terrorists and other non-state actors who are difficult to identify, much less deter.
• In recent Senate testimony, the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, himself a retired four-star Admiral, called the possibility of terrorists acquiring nuclear capability a “top concern,” and noted that traditional means of deterrence would likely be of “less utility” against such a threat.
• Were the United States to give Russia and other nuclear powers a pass on nuclear security by withdrawing from bilateral arms control and expanding our own arsenal, the danger that terrorists could buy or steal what they need to build a nuclear weapon would expand exponentially. The simple fact is that the more nuclear weapons there are, and the more states have them, the more likely they are to fall into the wrong hands.

Missile Madness - International Relations and Security Network [link]

• "Please join us for a viewing of a modern-day Reefer Madness, the Heritage Foundation's film about nuclear threats, 33 Minutes," read the invitation from the Center for American Progress (CAP). That the liberal CAP should be promoting a conservative think tank's film is unusual, except that the point of the program was to expose inaccuracies in the film.
• The high-budget, high-definition "33 Minutes" makes an unabashed appeal to raw fear, featuring shots of missile launches surrounded by flames against the backdrop of pictures of vulnerable cities and beaches, all in an effort to explain the need for a national missile defense system to protect the US against the threat of global missile proliferation.
• The film's arguments are based on "lies," said Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund. The lies fall into two basic categories, according to Cirincione: that the technology could work and that the threat is there.
• The most recent US attempt, on 1 February, to shoot down a ballistic missile mimicking an attack from Iran failed due to a radar malfunction.

Director Lucy Walker Takes on Nuclear Weapons in Countdown to Zero - Popular Mechanics [link]

• Countdown to Zero director Lucy Walker sat down with Popular Mechanics to discuss her new film about nuclear weapons, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
• "I think a lot of people think the problem has gone away. ... But it's not. Nuclear weapons are easier to make than ever before, whether you're a rogue state or a non-state actor—very shortly, non-state actors are going to be able to enrich their own uranium and make their own nuclear weapons, and that's a very scary world."
• "The value that nukes might have as a defense has been outweighed by the risk they pose. The policy of the president right now is a world without nuclear weapons, which sounds so dreamy and idealistic.  But when we get into the issues, you realize that there's no other solution but zero. Anything that isn't zero means we're in trouble."

A View from the Dark Side

Stop Nuclear Umbrella Holes Before START - Washington Times [link]

• While it is clear that short-term concerns with negotiations for a new START agreement with Russia are driving policy, it is foolhardy to conclude such a treaty before the administration receives the much-anticipated Nuclear Posture Review. The United States has too many issues on hold while awaiting the NPR to even consider making agreements with Russia now.
• It is so long since we have had an active nuclear weapon program that our capability to reconstitute one has been seriously degraded.
• Our current administration has yet to recognize how these problems are inter-related. Continuing to ignore these major issues places us - and our many allies that still shelter under the umbrella of America's extended deterrent - at increasing risk. Let us hope that some rays of sunshine will penetrate the gloom that presently pervades the lack of a comprehensive nuclear policy in the Obama White House.