When President Barack Obama assumed office in January 2009, confidence in U.S. leadership and global support for the nonproliferation regime were at historically low levels. The Bush policies, as noted in the last chapter, had increased the proliferation threat and weakened most proliferation barriers. After his Prague speech, the president seemed to be sprinting through his efforts to transform U.S. and global nuclear policy.
1 Supported and encouraged by foreign policy heavyweights, President Obama often repeated the pledge first made in Prague, “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
2 Obama, however, faced stiff resistance from recalcitrant bureaucrats and nuclear hawks and had to contend with Russian officials more interested in using reduction negotiations to relitigate old grievances than in redefining outdated strategies. Still the agenda had broad support within the American national security establishment and from other world leaders. Nuclear policy remained a top priority for the president, Vice President Joe Biden, and their key staff.
Obama’s overall goal was to refocus U.S. nuclear policy from the permanent maintenance of an immense nuclear arsenal with multiple missions to the reduction and eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons. This was based on a growing bipartisan consensus of former security and military officials. Former U.S. secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defense William Perry, and former Senate Armed Services chairman Sam Nunn were the leading proponents of this shift, embodied in their January 2007 and 2008 Wall Street Journal opinion pieces calling for “a world without nuclear weapons.” For their second op-ed, the four garnered the support of almost three-quarters of the still-living former U.S. secretaries of state and defense and national security advisors, including James Baker, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Frank Carlucci, Warren Christopher, and Melvin Laird.
Obama spoke of his strategic vision and program in Cairo, Moscow, the United Nations and other forums. He often said that he was continuing the vision of Presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who both championed nuclear disarmament. But he was the first to marry this vision to a series of practical steps when the international conditions were so favorable to change.
By September 2009, the new U.S. orientation was showing modest results. The UN Security Council, with most members represented by their heads of state, unanimously supported UN Resolution 1887, which explicitly linked increased enforcement of nonproliferation rules to a global commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. President Obama, the first U.S. president to chair a session of the Security Council, addressed his fellow heads of state:
The historic resolution we just adopted enshrines our shared commitment to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. And it brings Security Council agreement on a broad framework for action to reduce nuclear dangers as we work toward that goal. It reflects the agenda I outlined in Prague, and builds on a consensus that all nations have the right to peaceful nuclear energy; that nations with nuclear weapons have the responsibility to move toward disarmament; and those without them have the responsibility to forsake them.
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The next day, President Obama, joined by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, exposed the secret uranium-enrichment facility that Iran was building near the city of Qom. The revelation further isolated Iran as supporters walked away in embarrassment of this flagrant breach of Iran’s treaty obligations, and the facility’s potential use as a covert enrichment site ended.
It was not until April 2010, however, that the framework for the new approach was fully erected. After several delays in external and internal negotiations, the Obama administration ushered in its plans for a strengthened nonproliferation regime with three dramatic developments in eight days: the revamped Nuclear Posture Review on April 6, the New START agreement on April 8, and the Nuclear Security Summit on April 12–13. The Nuclear Posture Review explicitly reduced the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security policy. The New START treaty, signed by Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in Prague, was the most important strategic arms reduction treaty in twenty years, restoring critical inspection and verification mechanisms and lowering the level of permitted strategic weapons by one-third. The Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., gathered fifty world leaders, including thirty-seven heads of state and the heads of the United Nations and the European Union, for the largest, most senior-level conference ever held on nuclear policy. It produced an action plan to secure global stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium over the next four years, including immediate steps by many of the participating nations to reduce or eliminate their material stockpiles.
Together, these events impressed global leaders and publics and convinced many domestic skeptics of the viability of the new approach. The
Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, known for his centrist, realist views, wrote: “President Obama has turned the once utopian-sounding idea of global nuclear disarmament into a useful tool for U.S. foreign policy. His well-conceived, confidently executed three-part movement in statecraft this month should banish the notion that Obama’s ambitious nuclear goals spring from naiveté or inexperience.”
4 In addition, during May, the United States pressed for new UN sanctions on Iran while retaining the possibility of negotiations to resolve the crisis. On May 27, the administration released a new national security strategy with an emphasis on nuclear policy and a clear break from the Bush administration’s more unilateralist stance. Finally, on May 28, the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference had a surprising conclusion: the first consensus document in ten years and unanimous agreement on benchmarks for progress in accelerating nuclear disarmament and strengthening the barriers to the spread of these weapons.
Thus, over its first eighteen months, and intensely in April and May 2010, the new U.S. administration invested heavily in the nuclear security agenda. This new agenda reflected and supported the focus on core missions outlined in the May 2010 National Security Strategy: “Defeating al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan and around the globe; and our determination to deter aggression and prevent the proliferation of the world’s most dangerous weapons.” It also highlighted the return of a traditional pillar of American strength: “We must recognize that no one nation—no matter how powerful—can meet global challenges alone. As we did after World War II, America must prepare for the future, while forging cooperative approaches among nations that can yield results.”
5Obama seemed to hit the nuclear policy sweet spot: inspiring idealists with his vision and winning pragmatists with his practical programs. Each of the changes introduced by the Obama administration was relatively modest—hence the disappointment among some of his supporters who saw his Prague speech as a call for immediate, dramatic change. Cumulatively, however, the changes marked a significant change of direction and thus spawned criticism from the right. The arc of U.S. policy now bent toward deeper reductions in nuclear arsenals with reduced roles for these weapons in the U.S. national security strategy, a greater emphasis on collective diplomatic action to stop proliferators, and strong cooperative efforts to block nuclear terrorism.
The policy shift tried to strike a deft balance. While continuously asserting the ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, Obama understood that there was no agreement in the strategic policy community that nations could completely eliminate nuclear weapons or even that they should. There was agreement, however, that many of the practical steps one would take toward elimination—such as reducing arsenals and securing weapon-usable materials—were also steps that reduced the high risks from the 23,000 weapons then held by nine states and the possibility that more nations or groups would get these weapons.
These events seemed to demonstrate the truth of the oft-contested connection between disarmament and nonproliferation. U.S. and Russian commitment to arms reductions helped build the cooperation needed for tougher actions to control the spread of nuclear weapons; actions to control the spread of nuclear weapons increased the security needed for further reductions. It was a nuclear virtuous circle. Obama and his advisors believed that they had charted the correct course for history, reaching internal consensus and forging a smart, effective approach that would pay dividends for American and Western alliance security. It is one that hewed a middle course by understanding that the lines defining the middle had shifted—from a general acceptance of the permanence of nuclear arsenals to a general acceptance on the need to move steadily toward their elimination. Arms control and nonproliferation were quickly becoming the new realism.
Key questions remained, however: did the substance match up to the rhetoric, and did it change the international diplomatic situation for the better?
THE U.S. STRATEGIC POSTURE
The Obama administration’s guiding principles for nuclear strategy were set out in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a Congressionally mandated report asked of each president since the end of the Cold War. While it is essentially an internal document, other nations carefully scrutinize the plan for clues on the future role of nuclear weapons in the U.S. security structure. In a clear break from the Bush era, the Obama administration’s posture reduced the role of nuclear weapons in security policy and started a transformation of a nuclear policy to deal with twenty-first-century threats.
Obama’s initial challenge in developing the NPR was his assembly of a national security team that contained a number of senior staff who were not as personally committed to the vision of nuclear elimination laid out in Prague. The review process became a struggle within the administration between the “incrementalists” and “transformationalists.” It ended in a tie, with an approach that fell short of transformation but delivered significant change. With the personal involvement of President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the document was a delicately crafted posture that diminishes the role of nuclear weapons while maintaining a safe, secure, and robust nuclear deterrent.
The review said that it “altered the hierarchy of our nuclear concerns and strategic objectives” from a force configured for massive retaliation against another nation to a policy that “places the preventions of nuclear terrorism and proliferation at the top of the U.S. policy agenda.”
6 The review also ruled out the creation of new weapons, which the previous administration had doggedly pursued, and the need for any new nuclear tests or new nuclear missions. The shifting of priorities and investments reflected a more realistic understanding of the new security environment.
Politically, the most important deliverable from the 2010 posture review may have been the support of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a permanent end to nuclear testing. As Gates said in his foreword to the review, increased budgets for modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and the existing stockpile stewardship program “represent a credible modernization plan necessary to sustain the nuclear infrastructure and support our nation’s deterrent.”
7 Gates thus dropped his hesitation to support Senate approval of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which he had publicly expressed just eighteen months earlier.
8The 2010 review reinforced U.S. security commitments to its allies but also stated that the fundamental purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons was deterrence of nuclear use by others. The general assessment of the Department of Defense was that non-nuclear-weapon states constitute a threat that could be countered by the overwhelmingly superior conventional forces of the U.S. and its allies. Thus, the NPR contained a U.S. pledge to never use or threaten to use a nuclear weapon on a non-nuclear-weapon state that adheres to its nonproliferation obligations.
The NPR also signaled the Obama administration’s intention to further promote the reduction of all nuclear weapons across the board. The former secretary of state George Shultz approved of the move, saying, “deterrence is not necessarily strengthened by overreliance on nuclear weapons.”
9 In a 2010 briefing, James N. Miller, then the principal deputy undersecretary for policy at the Department of Defense, explained that changes to U.S. nuclear policy were overdue and noted that the Cold War mantra of “mutually assured destruction was a situation, not a strategy.”
10 He also noted that every president since the beginning of the nuclear era supported the concept of elimination, save George W. Bush. He rebutted the charges that the president’s policy was one of unilateral disarmament, asserting that “the conditions for zero [nuclear weapons] start with the understanding that the U.S. does not ‘go it alone.’”
11RESPONSES AND IMPLICATIONS
Though many were pleased with the new policies and new mode of thinking, there remained critics on both the right and the left. Those on the right, such as former UN ambassador John Bolton and columnist Charles Krauthammer, objected to any limitation on U.S. use of its arsenal, claiming the United States would not be able to defend itself in the event of a major biological attack.
12 Krauthammer called the new policy “quite insane,” “morally bizarre,” and “strategically loopy.” Reinforcing a theme the right was trying to develop about Obama, Krauthammer said “the naiveté is stunning” and portrayed the new policy as “the theory that our moral example will move other countries to eschew nukes.” On the contrary, he said, “The last quarter century—the time of greatest superpower nuclear-arms reduction—is precisely when Iran and North Korea went hellbent into the development of nuclear weapons.”
13The arguments on the right at first appeared more political but would develop into substantive critiques of the review later on in 2010, during the debate over New START. Some on the left jumped out with strong criticisms of the posture—specifically as it pertained to the budget for the nuclear weapons complex.
In 2010, the administration outlined a massive proposed increase in funding for the maintenance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and then delivered those numbers in the budget.
14 The administration told Congress that the funding levels for nuclear weapon programs under Obama would total $180 billion over the next decade (later increased to more than $215 billion), a significant increase in funding from the Bush administration (and, as later studies revealed, an underestimate of the true costs).
15 Disarmament advocates argued that calling for nuclear reductions while spending billions to maintain a bloated nuclear arsenal sent out a mixed message at home and abroad. “It’s somewhat of a schizophrenic nuclear policy,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists.
16 Still, nuclear hawks claimed that the budget increases were not enough. Several former U.S. officials disagreed. For example, former National Nuclear Security Administration director Linton Brooks, who served under multiple presidents, including George W. Bush, said that he “would have killed for [the current] budget.”
17The combination of increased investments and decreased deployments seemed to unite the core government defense constituencies around this new policy path. The NPR was fully supported by the defense agencies and Secretary Gates. The nuclear weapons lab directors Michael Anastasio, George Miller, and Tom Hunter went on record as saying that the U.S. arsenal can be maintained without explosive testing—as would be necessary under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: “We believe that the approach outlined in the NPR, which excludes further nuclear testing and includes the consideration of the full range of life extension options … provides the necessary technical flexibility to manage the nuclear stockpile into the future with an acceptable level of risk.”
18The 2010 NPR revamped the U.S. nuclear posture, but it was more than a national document—the world was watching. It was well received internationally, with U.S. allies praising the new policy as a “concrete” and “important step in the right direction” toward the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Allies also appreciated the NPR’s acknowledgement of “the persistence of serious threats to the security of the United States and its allies” and the importance of the United States “maintaining and strengthening reassurance to its allies.”
19 Former U.S. ambassador Richard Burt noted the NPR’s diplomatic benefits:
The posture review represents a necessary de-emphasis in the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense and foreign policy … [that will] strengthen President Obama’s hand in re-energizing international support for enhanced nonproliferation measures while raising the costs for any country, such as Iran, that positions itself as a nuclear renegade.
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A NEW START
Two days after the release of the NPR, President Obama returned to Prague. There, he and President Medvedev of Russia signed a new strategic arms reduction treaty dubbed “New START.” An update from the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991 (START I), this new treaty reduced the allowed number of operational strategic nuclear arms to 1,550 warheads on 700 deployed strategic launchers. Once ratified, it would reduce the size of deployed U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals to levels not seen since the Eisenhower presidency. The treaty also established a new, more efficient verification process that authorized the monitoring of nuclear activities in both nations and assured compliance with disarmament pledges. Through this treaty, the U.S. and Russia also worked to reset a relationship that had deteriorated under the previous administration.
Beyond extending and updating the critical verification measures of START I, the Obama administration saw the New START treaty as a key step in gaining the global cooperation needed to prevent nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation. By clearly reaffirming U.S. and Russian commitment to disarmament, the United States hoped to convince other states to also take the steps necessary to secure nuclear materials and block nuclear weapons trade and development—steps that are often expensive or cut against the commercial interests of many key nations.
There was broad bipartisan support for the treaty from military leaders and former government officials, including Stephen Hadley and Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security advisors to George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush, respectively, and from former secretary of defense James Schlesinger, who called ratification “obligatory.”
21 Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), for example, asked former secretary of state James Baker during treaty hearings if he thought “the START treaty will be a signal to the international community that the U.S. is serious about carrying out its responsibilities under the nonproliferation treaty.” Baker responded, “I think it will, Senator, and I think it was.”
22Some saw the treaty as critical in influencing partners to crack down on proliferating countries. As former secretary of defense William Perry stated: “To adequately deal with North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear aspirations, we need full cooperation of other nations, particularly Russia and China. This treaty will not guarantee that, but this treaty is moving us in that direction of a much better understanding of the relationship with Russia on these vital matters.”
23 Countries around the world commended the actions of the world’s two largest nuclear states to reduce their arsenals. Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband noted that the treaty “will help pave the way for further reductions worldwide.”
24 The diplomatic benefits of New START among non-weapons states such as Indonesia were also clear almost immediately:
The first steps in the right direction have been taken. The United States and the Russian Federation have signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). We are also cognizant of some positive aspects of the United States’ Nuclear Posture Review. We welcome these developments and what we expect will be the further marginalization of nuclear weapons.
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Indonesia’s pledge to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a step it completed in December 2011, was a clear illustration of the connection between disarmament and nonproliferation. As former secretary of defense William Perry noted in his Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony: “[New START] gives a clear signal to the world that the United States is serious about carrying out its responsibilities under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. This will be welcomed as a positive step by all other members of the NPT.”
In fact, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was the next item on the repair list.
GLOBAL STEPS TOWARD NONPROLIFERATION THROUGH NPT
President Obama fielded a senior diplomatic team for the May 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher, and NPT Ambassador Susan Burk. This demonstrated a greater commitment than the U.S. representation in 2005, which had no one above the rank of assistant secretary. The U.S. goals this time were modest but critical to the survival of the nonproliferation regime. Despite this, the administration remained divided—some U.S. officials saw the 2010 conference as an event they just had to get through with minimum damage while others viewed it as an opportunity to gather broad consensus for reinforcing nonproliferation rules. The latter group proved the more prescient.
Secretary Clinton trumpeted the New START agreement on the opening day of the conference and took a small but significant step toward greater transparency, disclosing the exact size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal: 5,113 warheads in its active stockpile as of September 30, 2009. Drawing attention to the 84 percent reduction from the peak stockpile in 1967, Secretary Clinton noted that “for those who doubt that the United States will do its part on disarmament, this is our record, these are our commitments and they send a clear, unmistakable message.”
26Most representatives, save Iran, welcomed the nuclear policy steps taken by the United States as “encouraging signs of progress,” as Minister of Foreign Affairs Marty Natalegawa of Indonesia noted on behalf of the 118 members and 17 observers of the Non-Aligned Movement.
27 To the surprise of most observers, the conference concluded with a consensus document that, though watered down from the more far-reaching steps proposed by some nations at the beginning of the conference, outlined specific steps all nations should take by the time of the next review conference, slated for 2015. “The successes achieved at the conference were made possible by the leadership exhibited from the U.S. team,” said U.S. Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball after the meeting, “and by the shift in U.S. nuclear weapons policy direction under President Obama over the past 15 months.”
28The specific steps included promises to strengthen IAEA safeguards; deter treaty withdrawals; bring Iran and North Korea back into compliance with the NPT; bring India and Pakistan into the nuclear weapons risk-reduction and elimination process; organize a conference on making the Middle East a zone free of nuclear weapons; accelerate cooperation on securing loose nuclear materials; and advance the nuclear disarmament process by bringing into force the nuclear test ban treaty, negotiating an end to the production of nuclear weapons materials, and reducing the roles and missions of nuclear weapons.
UK ambassador John Duncan summarized the results:
For the U.S. and UK the principle objective was to re-energize and give renewed focus to a part of the international institutional arena that had been broken and polarized for a decade. At its simplest it was to create a new constituency for action by empowering the center ground against more extreme views.… The first task was one of repair. Thus the important outcome lies not in the minutiae of the Final Document, but in the political processes created by last week’s agreement.… Some commentators complained about a supposed ‘lowest common denominator agreement’ or that the main success was the absence of failure. This is to rather miss the point. The NPT RevCon is not an end in itself, but like a marketing event in the private sector, the real importance lies in the process of engagement that follows.
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NUCLEAR REPRIEVE
Coming out of the NPT Review Conference, there was the sense that the world had brought the nonproliferation regime back from the brink of collapse. This was in large part attributable to the diplomatic space created by U.S. actions on nuclear policy. The analyst Deepti Choubey, attending on behalf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called the conference a “win for multilateralism.” She noted that “states were so eager to get an outcome in part because Obama has created a lot of political capital. The Prague speech created the atmosphere to achieve this outcome.”
30Obama’s new policy declarations and his concrete actions had made a difference. The diplomatic situation by the end of 2010 was quite different than it had been two years previously. That did not mean the road ahead would be easy. Thus far, it was only a course correction, and it was not yet clear how budgets, deployments, and diplomacy would shift or whether the new policy would thwart national nuclear ambitions more effectively than the policies of Obama’s predecessor.
President Obama seemed to understand this and made it clear that the U.S. cannot succeed without the help of the international community: “We are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation—we have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities and face consequences when they don’t.”
31 The new U.S. nuclear agenda had engaged the nations of the world in a more cooperative and determined process to reduce nuclear dangers and to at least talk about working toward the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. But how far would this cooperative enterprise advance? It had proven more effective than any recent alternative approaches, but could it last?