NATO-Russia Cooperation Creates Path to Deep Reductions

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

Stories we're following today: Tuesday, July 12, 2011.

Sleepwalking Into the Future - David Hoffman in Foreign Policy [link]

• NATO and Russia are discussing a U.S. plan to build a limited European ballistic missile defense system…The Russians have been warning that should this effort stall, it may not be possible to negotiate deeper cuts in existing nuclear arsenals.
• ... let’s hope NATO and Russia can find a way to agree on limited missile defense, if only to pave the way for genuine cooperation on what’s really important: reducing the existing outsized nuclear arsenals.
• Should arms control negotiations stall, and Russia builds the new heavy missile, it will stimulate a response in the United States, where the military services are already preparing modernization plans for the next generation of subs, missiles and aircraft to carry nuclear weapons … A revived nuclear arms race is the last thing the world needs to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War.

Why We Can't Fulfill Defense Plans - Yury Solomonov in The Moscow Times [link]

• Russia’s leaders have always been rightfully concerned about the country’s nuclear weapons. Yet the strategic goal to upgrade its aging nuclear arsenal has not been met.
• I suspect that the current program will last another four years and produce only modest results. Then it will be replaced by another weapons procurement program for the next 10-year period from 2015 to 2025, and I expect that we will see the same exact results.
• Based on the poor record of fulfilling defense procurement orders in 2011, it is clear that the overall defense plan, including modernizing the strategic nuclear weapons program, will not be met.

How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History - Kim Zetter in Wired [link]

• ... in June 2009, someone had silently unleashed a sophisticated and destructive digital worm [Stuxnet] that had been slithering its way through computers in Iran with just one aim — to sabotage the country’s uranium enrichment program and prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from building a nuclear weapon.
• Stuxnet... was a precision weapon bent on sabotaging a specific facility … [and] was the product of a well-resourced government with precise inside knowledge of the target it was seeking.
• One looming question remained, however. Had Stuxnet succeeded in its goal? If the malware’s aim had been to destroy centrifuges in Iran and cripple the country’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon, the consensus is that it failed.
• But if its intent was simply to delay and sow uncertainty in Iran’s nuclear program, then it appeared to succeed — for a time.

North Korea’s Presidency is not the CD’s Real Tragedy - Rob Golan-Vilella in Arms Control Now [link]

• Two weeks ago, some eyebrows were raised when North Korea assumed the rotating presidency of the Conference on Disarmament (CD)...an organization whose mission is to negotiate agreements relating to nuclear disarmament...The real tragedy is that the CD as an institution is so broken that it in all likelihood it will have no impact at all.
• The CD has not completed any substantial work since concluding the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996. For the past 15 years it has been stalled; in May 2009 it agreed to a work plan for the first time in a decade, but...because the 65-nation CD operates by consensus, a single nation can block progress at the CD. Unfortunately, since 2009 Pakistan has done exactly that, refusing to allow negotiations on an FMCT go forward./li>
• The United States and other interested nations should find ways to move forward on the FMCT that do not involve trying to break the decade-long deadlock at the CD – no matter which country happens to be chairing it.

Nunn-Lugar Program Dismantles Nuke-Capable Sub - Global Security Newswire [link]

• The U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction [CTR] program dismantled a ballistic-missile submarine during a two-month reporting period this spring, Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) announced on Monday
• The Nunn-Lugar initiative in March and April also safeguarded nine nuclear arms train shipments, constructed and outfitted eight biological agent monitoring stations and neutralized 112.52 metric tons of chemical warfare materials.
• Since being established in 1991 to secure and eliminate weapons of mass destruction in former Soviet states, the CTR program has deactivated 7,599 strategic nuclear warheads and destroyed 791 ICBMs, 498 ICBM silos, 180 mobile ICBM launchers, 670 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 492 SLBM launchers, 33 ballistic missile-capable submarines, 155 strategic bombers, 906 nuclear air-to-surface missiles and 194 nuclear test tunnels.