Below is a transcript of Christopher Paine’s talk delivered at the “Modernization of the Nuclear Weapons Complex” Workshop

Faded “Vision”
The Obama Administration’s Retreat from Nuclear Disarmament

Christopher Paine

May 1, 2010

In a widely heralded April 2009 speech in Prague, President Obama pledged “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” While not the first U.S. president to pledge support for this aspirational goal, he was the first to link it to “a trajectory we need to be on,” comprised of “concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.” He also promised “to put an end to Cold War thinking” in the U.S. by reducing “the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” and pledged that his administration would seek to:

• Conclude “a legally binding and sufficiently bold” nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia that would “set the stage for further cuts” involving “all nuclear weapons states;”
• Begin negotiations on “a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons,” and
• “Immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”

President Obama faces significant political opposition to all or parts this agenda at home and abroad, so it comes as no surprise that he has been unable to date to deliver on any of these initiatives. The New Start Treaty with Russia is only modestly constraining rather than ”sufficiently bold,” and thus it does not set the stage for multilateral cuts involving “all nuclear weapons states.” It has a leisurely implementation period stretching to 2017 for what are exceedingly modest nuclear cuts, and in some cases, no cuts at all.

Similarly, for domestic political reasons that are quite understandable, his Administration has not been able to deliver on his pledge to “immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.” In fact, preoccupied with other pressing matters and lacking the Senate supermajority needed for ratification, his Administration has done little if anything concrete to advance the prospects for U.S. ratification and eventual entry-into-force of the CTBT.

Finally, Pakistan and most likely other states, currently shielded by Pakistan’s objections, are blocking agreement on a work program in the CD that would allow the beginning of negotiations on a multilateral Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. In truth, it was a bit disingenuous of President Obama to advance the FMCT as a critical early milepost of progress toward disarmament, given that the impasse in the CD was of long duration and very well known. While the Obama Administration tends to blame external forces for all these failures, much of the explanation can be found in the ambivalent response of the Administration itself  to the idea of moving toward implementing, rather than merely “envisioning,” a world without nuclear weapons.

Here the President is as guilty as his harshest critics, damning his own supposed disarmament aspirations with faint praise. During his Prague speech a year ago, President Obama stated the view that nuclear disarmament “will not be reached quickly –- perhaps not in my lifetime,” and then added this debilitating caveat: “Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies.” Since Obama’s lifetime is likely to extend another 30-40 years, implicit in his statement is the expectation that the United States will maintain a “safe, secure and effective” nuclear arsenal for at least that long.

That Presidential expectation is now a U.S. government plan.  His administration’s recently released Nuclear Posture Review Report (NPR) endorses a nuclear strategy—and tens of billions of dollars in future investments in U.S. nuclear force structure and the supporting industrial complex—that are directed precisely at ensuring that a “modernized” and militarily “effective” U.S. nuclear arsenals will endure for at least another half-century.[1] After a brief year of living hopefully, the goal of nuclear disarmament is once again being relegated to its time-honored status as a rhetorical pledge.

Like all Administrations before it, the Obama Administration has succumbed to the internal political-industrial and bureaucratic forces that are, on all sides, the true obstacles to the achievement of a world without nuclear weapons. These powerful interests shape the internal U.S. (and Russian) debate in a way that prioritizes the replication of Cold War nuclear capabilities for design and production of nuclear weapons above any rational reconsideration of the role these weapons of mass annihilation should be allowed play in maintaining both U.S. and international peace and security.

President Obama has allowed himself to become ensnared in a logical and political cul-de-sac, epitomized by his pledge that “as long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary…”  The words “safe, secure, and effective” are political code words for a policy that provides for a process of continuing improvement in the design and manufacture of nuclear weapons. The intent, even under the CTBT, is to incorporate changes in warheads that will augment their intrinsic resistance to accidental chemical explosive detonation and dispersal of warhead plutonium (warhead “safety”), theft or unauthorized use of a warhead (warhead “security”), all the while sustaining or improving warhead reliability and overall nuclear system performance against military targets (the so-called “effectiveness” of the nuclear deterrent.

However, to continue doing all these things, one needs a rather large, skilled, and active nuclear weapons complex, and the Catch-22 resides in the fact that if the United States maintains such an active complex producing “modernized” weapons, other states will too, and thus the point at which Obama envisions the U.S. giving up its “nuclear arsenal” will never arrive.

Any politically sincere approach to the challenge of nuclear disarmament logically requires a progressive restriction of the activities of nuclear weapon complexes, such that all states become internally as well as externally aligned with the goal of phasing out nuclear deterrence by progressively eliminating nuclear arsenals, rather than indefinitely replicating,  and worse yet,  evolving them on into the future.

The global nuclear weapons enterprise must be wound down in order achieve definitive progress toward a world without nuclear weapons. The Obama Administration’s newly announced nuclear policy, and one might add, those of Russia, the U.K., and France, head in the opposite direction, toward the indefinite retention and further refinement of nuclear stockpiles into succeeding generations.  This will only serve to empower politically the very military and scientific-industrial complexes that owe their continuing prosperity and influence to the perpetuation and continuing modernization of nuclear arsenals, creating a formidable political counterweight to the popular push for nuclear disarmament.

Indeed, comparing the limits in the New Start Treaty with the nuclear forces both sides have deployed to date under the Moscow Treaty, and taking account of the reinvigorated nuclear weapons programs underway in both Russia and the U.S., it appears that the process of nuclear arms reduction is decelerating, and may even grind to a halt for an extended period.

The New Start Treaty will require the U.S. to remove from deployment on the order of 100 strategic ballistic missiles and bombers from the currently deployed total of 798 strategic nuclear delivery vehicles (SNDVs), but it appears the current overall number of 2100 operationally deployed U.S. strategic warheads will need to be reduced only marginally or not at all, depending on how the missile and bomber cuts are implemented. Because each strategic bomber counts as one warhead but can carry up to 20 nuclear weapons, there will be on average some 450 deliverable bomber weapons that will not count against the overall treaty ceiling of 1550 warheads.  There are  also empty spaces on U.S ballistic missiles, “downloaded” under the Moscow Treaty of 2002, that originally were designed to carry a much larger number of weapons, giving the U.S. an “up-load” capability vastly in excess of the treaty’s deployed warhead limit.

TABLE A:  Nuclear Disarmament Has Reached a Plateau[2]

The situation on the Russian side is somewhat comparable.  Russia is currently 134 delivery vehicles below the 700 SNDV limit, and could in theory build up to it by deploying new missiles or bombers, but it is currently about 190 weapons above the warhead limit.  Russia appears to have an even larger population than the U.S. of uncounted bomber weapons, but an aging and less effective bomber force.

Both sides have until 2017 to make these modest force adjustments. Despite the President’s Nobel Peace Prize and his “world without nuclear weapons rhetoric” it’s clear that his Administration regards the goal of nuclear disarmament as purely aspirational. After 15 months in office, there is still not a single program or effort within the Obama Administration that is looking at the transition to a nuclear disarmed world, or even at a transitional stage of “finite deterrence” among the nuclear weapon powers with stockpiles of a few hundred weapons.

The posture review devotes a total of four broad brush paragraphs to the subject of “Toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” enumerates a lengthy list of prior conditions to the achievement of same, and then concludes “we can – and must – work actively to create those conditions.” Beyond this vague exhortation, the NPR contains nothing, zero, zip, that even touches on the international structures and political tasks involved in enabling the transition to a nuclear weapons free world.

Here is what President Obama is actually doing, as opposed to “envisioning,” in relation to the goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

• He is launching programs to invest tens of billions of dollars in the reconstruction of the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex for the next fifty years.  He is proposing to build major new facilities for manufacturing plutonium, uranium, and non-nuclear weapons components. The fissile material facilities won’t come on line until 2021 at the earliest, and they will have useful lives on the order of 50 years. Rather than winding down the nuclear weapons complexes in the U.S. and Russia, Obama and Medvedev are jointly ensuring that they obtain a new lease on life that will another half-century at least.

• Obama is proposing that the United States begin development of a new strategic ballistic missile submarine, a new submarine reactor, a new air-launched cruise missile, a new B61-12 warhead, and a nuclear version of the F-35 joint strike fighter to deliver the warhead from bases in Europe. “Extended nuclear deterrence” is being preserved and modernized, and buttressed with both missile defense and conventional prompt global strike weapons

• Obama is maintaining all three legs of the nuclear “triad” along with their current and mind-bogglingly wasteful alert rates and at-sea patrols.  He couldn’t even bring himself to decide to retire early two of the 14 Ohio class SSBNs, but will “consider” doing so “in the second half of this decade,” i.e. by the end of his second term, if he gets one.
• He is investing $1 billion over the next five years in upgrades to the dual capable B-2 bomber (which will also carry the new B61-Mod 12)and developing a highly accurate conventional ICBM-launched hypersonic glide weapon for “prompt global strike,” – exhibiting a global imperialist mentality for preemptive attack that can only encourage additional countries to reach for nuclear deterrents.

This is not the program of a President who is seriously interested in laying the foundation for nuclear disarmament “within his lifetime,” or even after it. His abundance of caution, and his desire to straddle the political spectrum in order to chalk up easy political “victories,” clearly has gotten the better of him.

The claim that the Administration is launching “a comprehensive national research and development program” to support continued progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons” is bogus. There is no such program in the FY 11 budget request. Maybe next year. The “expanded work on verification technologies” is almost certainly a vague reference to a DOE-NNSA budget line for the nuclear weapon laboratories that funds clandestine nuclear test  and fissile material detection technologies, which program has existed for 30 years at least. I used to round up funds for this program when I worked in the Senate on military matters in the late 1980’s, and these were really unilateral intelligence programs.

Moreover, emphasizing the necessity of further technology development misconstrues the essential nature of the nuclear disarmament problem. It is 90% a political, legal, and institutional reform task (both domestic and international). There is already ample existing monitoring technology to underpin a global nuclear disarmament regime. On the technology side, the primary need is for systems-level analyses of how the various technology pieces could function together, in both cooperative verification and unilateral intelligence gathering, to provide adequate confidence in compliance.  The fact that the Obama Administration claims to be focusing on further technology development — performed by the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, no less — rather than global institutional, legal, and political steps, is just further evidence that it is not serious about the nuclear disarmament objective.

– Christopher E. Paine

Director, Nuclear Program

Natural Resources Defense Council

(202) 422-4853 <cpaine@nrdc.org>

Notes

[2] Table A Sources:  R. S. Norris and H.M. Kristensen, Nuclear Notebook: U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2009, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2009; Norris and Kristensen, Russian Nuclear Forces, 2010, BAS, January/February 2010; Treaty Compliance, Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I): Executive Summary, www.dod.gov/acq/acic/treaties/start1/execsum.htm;  Hans Kristensen, “New  START Treaty Has New Counting,” www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2010/03/newstart.php;