During the 2008 presidential campaign, the then-Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill), rarely spoke of nuclear weapons or arms control, but when he did he pledged to follow policies similar to those recommended by groups such as the Nuclear Threat Initiative,1 and various former high-ranking government officials, including former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former senator Sam Nunn, and former secretary of defense William J. Perry, among others who had promoted a vision of the world free of nuclear weapons. Senator Obama, along with these distinguished defense and foreign policy experts, came under attack from defense analysts who questioned the wisdom and feasibility of a nuclear-free world. Few of the arguments were new or especially persuasive; indeed, George Perkovich and James Acton have identified them as the “fatuous five.”2 Yet even commentators who generally agreed with the goal of a nuclear-free world questioned whether a new president would or could actually follow through on such a promise, or have the political courage to push the logic of zero in the face of domestic and international opponents.
On the surface, Senator Obama’s approach to nuclear weapons was not all that different from that of his Republican rival, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz). In a major speech at the University of Denver, Senator McCain argued, “Today, we deploy thousands of nuclear warheads. It is my hope to move as rapidly as possible to a significantly smaller force.”3 In Denver, as in other campaign speeches, candidate McCain also sought to disassociate himself, cautiously, from the nuclear policies of the Bush administration by offering qualified support for the Non-proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, as well as international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, after the election, when President Obama endorsed the logic of zero in Prague and elsewhere, Senator McCain spoke on the Senate floor, arguing, “[L]et us keep in mind the dream of a nuclear free world enunciated so eloquently by our 40th president.”4 Senator McCain, as he had during the presidential campaign, sought to cloak his support for arms control and disarmament by assuming the mantle of President Ronald Reagan, including the spirit of Reykjavik.
As the U.S. presidential candidates were staking out positions on nuclear weapons and their role in maintaining world peace and security, an international movement was growing to abolish nuclear weapons; prominent politicians and policy analysts in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere were calling for the United States to lead the way toward a world free of nuclear weapons. One prominent contribution was an article in Foreign Affairs, “The Logic of Zero,” by Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal.5 The public efforts of retired politicians, policy-makers, and academic entrepreneurs helped create a policy window for President Obama and other world leaders to step through and pursue a broad-based agenda for peace based on the simple idea that the very existence of nuclear weapons threatens world peace.
Daalder and Lodal propose that the United States should help create a coalition of countries that accept the logic of zero. They argue that: (1) a world without nuclear weapons is the only way of guaranteeing that such weapons will never be used; (2) in the interim the only valid purpose for nuclear weapons is to prevent their use by others; and (3) all fissile material must be subject to international accounting and control. Their case rests on the strategic logic that the only purpose underlying American nuclear weapons is to prevent use by others, and thus the United States can reduce its own arsenal to roughly 1,000 total weapons. Once this is done the United States should establish a “comprehensive” nonproliferation regime to account for and monitor all fissile materials. Numerous op-ed articles, scholarly assessments, and books echoing Daalder’s and Lodal’s Foreign Affairs piece have followed.6 Yet as Randy Rydell argues, “[M]any of these zero initiatives suffer from zero follow-up.”7
This chapter identifies ways to advance and sustain the logic of nuclear disarmament beyond those suggested by Daalder and Lodal and other scholars working in this field. It is aimed, first and foremost, at President Obama and his foreign and security policy teams because, as a practical matter, American leadership is essential to the fate of the movement toward eliminating nuclear weapons. The chapter focuses on the internal actions that the U.S. government could undertake to help ensure that other countries do not discount American efforts as “cheap talk, talk that will not be followed by concrete actions that are not readily reversible.”8 In the language of international relations theory, the chapter urges actions that will demonstrate a “credible commitment” to the logic of zero.9 As Perkovich and Acton argue, “[E]xploration of the challenges of abolition must take place in parallel with practical near term steps (lest they be nothing more than empty rhetoric).”10
First, this chapter supports President Obama’s call for a world summit to include the leaders of existing nuclear states, threshold states, and those countries that, presumably, could acquire nuclear weapons relatively quickly given their access to nuclear fuel and the technologies and engineering capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Although progress on bilateral arms control and disarmament between the United States and Russia is important, if for no other reason than that they control roughly 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, wider global action will be required to address the risks associated with some of the newer nuclear weapons states.
Second, the chapter argues that the President should put on hold suggestions to introduce new arms control initiatives;11 further, he should pursue only minimal changes, including extensions, to existing arms control and disarmament agreements. Simplifying the U.S. arms control agenda, and therefore using U.S. leadership to limit the number of arms control initiatives pursued by the international community at any one time, would maximize the attention devoted to the headline goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. This simplification process should commence immediately and continue until world leaders have developed and committed to a comprehensive process for achieving nuclear disarmament.12
Third, and most important, the chapter proposes that President Obama should order the U.S. military and national security community to engage seriously with the fact that the nation can no longer rely on nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of American national security. After all, the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review already emphasized “reducing the role of U.S. nuclear weapons” in US defense policy by limiting the circumstance under which the nation reserves the right to employ nuclear weapons and pledging to strengthen conventional capabilities. Specifically, the president must use his executive powers, role as commander-in-chief, and power of persuasion with the American public and Congress to examine how the nation would implement nuclear dis armament. Each of these three steps supports Daalder’s and Lodal’s idea of developing a “strategic logic that explains how the world can get there from here.”13
In eight years in the White House President Bush did not make arms control or disarmament a priority. One of the Bush administration’s most prominent foreign policy decisions was to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty unilaterally with little or no consultation with Russia, the other signatory to the agreement. Yet, in the Moscow Treaty and the negotiations to follow-on the achievements of START I, the Bush administration was willing to discuss, within tight limits, further arrangements with Russia. At the same time, the Bush administration, working with the nuclear industrial complex, proponents within the military, and Congress continued to pursue vertical proliferation that greatly troubled arms control proponents. At various points, the president’s advisors pushed to develop a new class of so-called bunker buster weapons designed to destroy hardened or buried WMD facilities. They also supported the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, reportedly to ensure the viability of existing nuclear weapons far into the future.
Perhaps most troubling was a development that had less to do with nuclear weapons and programs than with U.S. strategic intent. In 2002 the new National Security Strategy focused not only on deterrence but on preemption or even preventive war; administration critics feared that the Bush administration was lowering the threshold for using military force and perhaps even nuclear weapons. Some analysts concluded that the Bush administration’s focus on preemption had actually shifted international debates and national strategies in the direction of either preemptive or preventive action.14 Given loose talk about the need to take preemptive military action against rogue nuclear states or even threshold states, and the well-known difficulties of destroying weapons and facilities buried deep within underground bunkers, some analysts concluded that small-yield, earth-penetrating nuclear weapons were the only viable way to maintain deterrence and threaten the nuclear programs of other states. As the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review briefings suggested, nuclear weapons could “defeat enemies by holding at risk those targets that could not be destroyed by other types of weapons.”15
In sharp contrast to the previous administration, the Obama administration managed to stake out a strong position on nuclear issues during its first one hundred days in office and to take numerous concrete steps to revive arms control initiatives. On April 5, 2009, President Obama chose Prague as the venue for making his first major speech on nuclear arms and arms control.16 The president made two notable points: (1) America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons; and (2) a Global Summit on Nuclear Security, to be held within the next year. Four days earlier, in London, Russian president Medvedev and President Obama had essentially, “endorsed a nuclear-free world—zero nuclear weapons—to be achieved on a step-by-step basis,”17 and laid the groundwork for the START negotiations originally intended to meet a fall 2009 deadline, negotiations that reached fruition with the signing of the New START treaty on April 9, 2010. On September 24, 2009, the United Nations Security Council weighed in by adopting a U.S.-sponsored resolution favoring a “world without nuclear weapons.”18
With the New START agreement signed and —as of December 2010— ratified, the Obama administration should focus on fine tuning its diplomatic approach and on implementing its public commitment to global zero domestically. For the president’s agenda to have a chance to succeed, it must have strong support from all elements of the executive branch, including those agencies and departments that might naturally be skeptical of the zero option, and commitment from key congressional leaders. With the Democratic Party’s loss of the majority position within the U.S. House of Representatives and the reduction of its majority in the Senate after the 2010 mid-term elections, the task will not be easy. But President Obama retains powerful rhetorical advantages, executive authorities, and, not insignificantly, the ability to engage in old-fashioned political horse trading with opponents to his arms control and disarmament agendas.
As promised in Prague and implicitly supported by the UN Security Council, to earn widespread support for the logic of zero from the nuclear states and the wider international community, the Obama administration should continuously and repeatedly engage the leaders of concerned powers on the issue of global zero. President Obama’s team should continue to fan out across the world, engaging all interested parties, not simply the major nuclear powers or threshold states of immediate concern. However, the Obama administration should take a different approach than advised thus far by experts on the ques tion of who should attend nuclear arms control and disarmament meetings, when the meetings should occur, and what agenda the initial meeting should follow.
Attendance. The question of who should attend a global summit is controversial. The past dictates that invitations should be issued to the heads of the five leading nuclear powers—the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, and France. Yet limiting attendance to the Perm-5 would constrain the overarching ambition of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. It would hold future negotiations hostage to an earlier time, when the individual states either had nuclear weapons or not, and thus were involved in negotiations or not. Today’s reality is that two other states—India and Pakistan—admittedly possess nuclear weapons, another—North Korea—has clearly conducted nuclear tests, and a third—Israel—is widely assumed to have nuclear weapons but does not acknowledge possession officially. And this accounting does not include threshold states such as Iran, which could have nuclear weapons within five to ten years or so, depending on who is doing the analysis. Finally, several states have a military-industrial complex capable of building nuclear weapons and may, under present circumstances, soon have the incentives to begin weapons programs themselves.19
The bottom line is that all of these states have a stake in getting to zero. All nuclear powers and threshold powers should be included formally as summit attendees. Critics will argue that this would give “rogue” states that have not complied with earlier nuclear agreements the status and respect otherwise denied by the international community. The counterargument is that conferring status and respect is less dangerous than allowing rogue states to pursue their ambitions free from the prying eyes of the international community, and without taking advantage of opportunities to negotiate with states possessing such dangerous weapons.
Schedule. In Prague President Obama pledged to convene the world summit as soon as is practical.20 Given the numerous items on the administration’s international and domestic agendas, the summit should be scheduled for as early in the president’s third year in office as is possible, preferably after having won ratification for the New START agreement. This will allow the president several degrees of freedom because the administration’s next nuclear diplomatic initiative will take place well past the partisan debates of the 2010 mid-term elections and before the beginnings of the 2012 presidential campaign. With many of the thorny issues of force structure, counting rules, verification, monitoring, and so forth already addressed in the negotiations of the two nuclear superpowers leading to New START, the world summit will allow discussions of these and other issues with the wider range of nuclear states to proceed. The U.S.-Russian agreement, along with the Nuclear Posture Review, provides a baseline against which initial discussion of the most likely problems along the road to general nuclear disarmament can proceed, including the small numbers problem and the technicalities of nonproliferation, and unforeseen issues can receive early attention.
Agenda. The summit agenda must be carefully negotiated. What should be on the summit agenda? First and foremost it aims to focus the world community for the coming decade on the singular purpose of getting to zero. In effect, the nuclear arms control agenda should be reset to prioritize effective disarmament. Second, the summit must establish a process for moving forward. Participants must set a firm timetable for further summits and working groups. Each should have hard deadlines, interim milestones, and hard expectations. One way around the obvious disparities among the size of the nuclear forces involved and the various areas of concern and incentives would be to devise concentric circles of engagement, beginning perhaps with the two largest nuclear powers, and ending perhaps with threshold states or even nuclear-capable states. Third, another not insignificant part of the summit’s agenda should be to raise the profile of nuclear issues in world opinion. Public support for nuclear arms control has waned with the end of the Cold War. The nuclear freeze movement that pressured politicians in the United States and Europe during the 1980s has no significant counterpart today. The United States can give the logic of zero momentum by acting unilaterally in ways that publicize its commitment and put pressure on its counterparts. As Freedman observes, “If this undertaking is going to be treated with the seriousness it deserves over an extended period, public opinion will need to be engaged.”21
In many respects, the existing nuclear arms control regime may be part of the problem in getting to zero. Like any regime, arms control consists of “principles, norms, rules, and decision making procedures around which actor expectations converge.”22 Yet the nuclear arms control regime was designed and evolved in another time, during a period of bipolarity, superpower rivalry, and more limited prospects for proliferation. The regime does not necessarily fit the current distribution of power within the international system, or the most immediate challenges to global security. Past nuclear arms control agreements have, of necessity, led to the reification of both international and national bureaucracies devoted to administering a particular agreement or process vice more general solutions to questions of nuclear security. As such, the bureaucracies are not necessarily open to new direction or to political guidance that may dramatically alter their roles, missions, prestige, and, ultimately, usefulness. Of course, this is true, only more so, for the military communities and intelligence agencies whose raison d’être would be most threatened by arms control or disarmament agreements.
Specifically, many if not most of the existing agreements regarding nuclear weapons and materials were decided or had their origins in the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Everything from decisions on force levels to processes to timetables to verification regimes hinged upon the diplomatic, political, technological, and security needs of the two nuclear superpowers. Daalder and Lodal, for example, explicitly adopt this framing by arguing that Russia and the United States remain at the center of future agreements. Indeed, the Obama administration implicitly endorsed the Russia-first paradigm by agreeing on a bilateral meeting with Russia before the president had even announced its more general commitment in Prague.23
While in a numerical sense—Russia and the United States control a disproportionate percentage of the world’s nuclear weapons—this is reasonable, it is not a tactic designed to garner the support of the lesser nuclear states, so-called rogue states, and threshold states for a wider push toward zero. Each of these groups will present unique challenges to the push for disarmament, but all would benefit from inclusion rather than exclusion.
Several of the most immediate challenges to nuclear security involve states— Iran, North Korea, and Israel, for example—which have been at the periphery of arms control processes historically and, worse still, at the periphery of most forms of international governance for the entire nuclear age. As such, nuclear and near-nuclear states that are not members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty or other international fora have little stake in the existing state of affairs, and virtually no history of participating in arms control negotiations in a positive way. If anything, they have a vested interest, domestically as well as internationally, in maintaining their outsider status. At home, resistance to pressure from other nuclear powers confers prestige and legitimacy on leaders. In Iran, for example, virtually the entire political spectrum,24 regardless of their position on other foreign policy issues such as Westernization or an independent approach toward regional security, agree that acquiring nuclear weapons is essential not only for national security, including deterrence, but for the political benefits that would accrue in terms of regional leadership.25
At the world summit and within all associated negotiations, the United States should encourage other nations, both nuclear and non-nuclear, to table, at least temporarily, existing agreements and ongoing negotiations. Getting to zero will require a clean slate, an international tabula rasa, for building a new nuclear arms control regime from the ground up in a way that recognizes new political realities. The reasons underlying this recommendation extend far beyond beginning with a fresh start.
First, as odd as this may seem, there is a question of efficiency. The number and quality of specialists in nuclear disarmament (and associated disciplines, including monitoring, verification, and nuclear forensics) in both individual countries and the various nongovernmental and supranational organizations that support arms control initiatives are limited. This is especially true with regard to political leaders who have taken the time and effort to gain special expertise in the challenges of nuclear arms control. Participation by the epistemic community of arms control experts, scientists, and engineers and by highly competent national level politicians is essential to moving forward with a broad international effort to implement the zero option. There are five bilateral U.S.-Russia arms control organizations and six multilateral ones on the books. This number does not include the individual bureaucracies within nuclear states charged with the nuclear dimensions of diplomacy and security. Nor does it even hint at the private sector organizations and groups, big and small, which are in the business of studying, promoting, and even defeating arms control measures; such private groups are significant, not only as a source of expertise, talent, and innovative ideas, but because they also provide the personnel and bully pulpits that will be required to capture the public’s attention and thus pressure governments to move forward toward zero. For large and wealthy countries, focusing on multiple nuclear arms control and disarmament agendas and processes is difficult enough; for smaller or less well endowed countries, this shortage of expertise might place serious limitations on their ability to engage in new initiatives.
Second, a new set of relatively inexperienced national political leaders will be engaged in negotiations over the next several years in place of the vast experience, knowledge, and long-standing commitment represented by politicians like Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Schmitt, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger. New leaders will operate in an international security environment unlike any other in the post-Hiroshima age. On the positive side, new leaders may be able to jettison old baggage. The mistakes made in the past (such as, perhaps, the U.S. abrogation of the ABM Treaty?), historical disagreements on substance (for example, about counting, verification, monitoring rules), and relatively rare instances of bad faith should be set aside. They happened, they were unfortunate, but current leaders are not bound to repeat earlier errors, settle old scores, or follow in the policy footsteps of previous generations. Further, the current generation of world leaders may be more open to the significance and potential of new techniques and technologies (such as nuclear forensics and the types of audit that James Acton addresses in his chapter in this volume). New leaders can and certainly must learn, but this generation and the next of world political leaders must focus on positive momentum toward zero, rather than short-term jockeying for position or the domestic benefits of resisting international arms control and disarmament negotiations. Providing for long-term, non-nuclear national security, perhaps complete with local and regional confidence-building measures and even security guarantees offered by a strengthened United Nations, could help overcome domestic support for nuclear weapons programs.
Third, the familiar social science concept of path dependence provides insight into why a fresh approach with renewed focus on the specifics of implementing the logic of zero makes political and policy sense. Historians and institutionally minded social scientists of all kinds generally focus on the ways in which past choices shape and constrain existing organizations and outcomes.26 With sufficient political will, diplomatic savvy, and public support, President Obama and other heads of government have an opportunity to prevent previous decisions, mistakes, and misunderstanding from constraining the future. As later sections of this chapter will suggest, President Obama can take steps as commander-in-chief that will remove obstacles to nuclear disarmament presented by his own national security bureaucracies. And by doing so, he will help other leaders break long-standing patterns of behavior and institutional inertia.
Fourth, public attention like that of domestic bureaucracies and political leaders is limited and fickle. Concentrating on getting to zero, vice incrementally dealing with a wide variety of arms control, disarmament, and nuclear policy issues, will provide the public with greater clarity.
If the United States is committed to the Zero Option it will need to match its rhetoric and international diplomacy with bold decisions regarding its own nuclear policies, programs, and processes. Reshaping internal policies in ways supportive of zero would demonstrate the nation’s commitment without damaging U.S. security. It would provide a road map for the type of actions other nuclear states could adopt as they too walked back from relying on nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of security. It will be difficult politically but, given the stakes at hand, might be the only way to begin the road to zero. It is also in keeping with President Obama’s general approach: as Steve Pifer observes, “[T]he Obama administration’s view [is] that U.S. nuclear policy and force levels should take account of nuclear non-proliferation, arms control, and broader security objectives.”27
President Obama should pledge to defer new programmatic decisions on nuclear weapons and systems until after the world summit, if not beyond; in effect, the United States should impose a moratorium, unilateral if necessary, on the development of nuclear weapons as well as on upgrading or expanding the complex of laboratories and firms involved in weapons production. In practice this would mean working with Congress to defer action on key programs associated with the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. In announcing this decision, the president should encourage allies and others to take similar actions pending the results of the summit. Early accounts of congressional posturing over ratification of the New START agreement suggest that programmatic restraint may not be possible. Senators such as influential Republican arms control expert Jon Kyl (R-AZ) reportedly insisted that the Obama administration’s support for large-scale funding increases for nuclear stockpile management and modernization programs was part of their price for voting in favor of ratification.
The president can act decisively to overcome two sticking points for the international community, especially nuclear and near-nuclear states, left over from the Bush administration and, indeed, presidential administrations extending back to the Cold War era itself. The Obama administration could reassure the international community by: (1) ending the RRW once and for all, both metaphorically and in reality, because, despite the formal death of RRW in Congress, proponents continue to lobby for its revival, and (2) declaring plans to build so-called bunker buster weapons,28 particularly the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), to be over and destined to remain just plans.
The RRW program rested on the assumption that “warheads deteriorate with age.”29 Thus, for RRW supporters, to maintain the nation’s nuclear deterrent and potential nuclear warfighting required the means to “improve the reliability, longevity, and certifiability of existing weapons and their components.”30 Regardless of the endless policy and technical debates over whether this is a necessity and whether or not RRW is the only way to ameliorate the possibility of deterioration that could lead to warhead unreliability, the symbolism of canceling the program for good would outweigh potential losses in weapons reliability, especially if computer simulations and other measures provide ways to maintain remaining warheads.31 This would be a bold political statement of the first order. It would also require the Obama administration and its congressional allies to overcome the natural inclination of bureaucracies to survive with existing and preferred missions intact through whatever means necessary; in this case recasting the concerns of RRW proponents as Stockpile Stewardship may help justify continued funding for federal nuclear weapons laboratories without associating the program with efforts to develop new nuclear weapons.32
Congress refused to approve funding for the RNEP in 2005 after several reputable groups marshaled technical and operational arguments against the small nuclear weapon. Then-senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) concluded at the time that “[t]he focus will now be with the Defense Department and its research into earth-penetrating technology using conventional weaponry. The NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration] indicated that this research should evolve around more conventional weapons rather than tactical nuclear devices. With this department change in policy, we have agreed not to provide DOE with funding for RNEP.”33 Even with the seemingly decisive defeat of the RNEP, program scientists and strategists continue to dream of a usable “bunker buster” because many states have buried their nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons research, development, production, and storage facilities deep underground. Preemption or even retaliation against such facilities is difficult with both conventional and nuclear warheads, but the increased yield of nuclear weapons makes their success more feasible according to some analysts. Nevertheless, in the context of efforts to promote the logic of zero, it is in the interest of the United States to renounce the use of nuclear weapons, newly designed or otherwise, for this use because of the signal it would send to the rest of the world.
Assuredly other experts could conceive of other perhaps more acceptable confidence-building measures above and beyond the two discussed here. In his chapter in this volume, for example, Alexei Arbatov argues that the U.S. deploy ment of cruise missiles on four Ohio class submarines (SSGNs) is destabilizing because it raises serious verification difficulties and could lead to an arms race at sea. SSGNs, while highly touted as transformational by some national security experts, are not essential for striking in-land targets—there are other far more powerful and far more transparent ships available with the vertical launch systems (VLS) necessary to fire ground-attack cruise missiles. The difference is that these ships do not have the SSGN’s history of being used as part of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
If the United States wants to demonstrate seriousness in its pursuit of zero it will not only have to shift gears internationally, but it will have to overcome resistance from the military, intelligence, and defense-industrial communities with vested interest in either the status quo or in an alternative future in which nuclear weapons play an even greater part in U.S. defense planning than they do now. This will require tremendous political will, not to mention the expenditure of scarce political capital on the part of key members of the president’s national security team. In Prague, the president signaled his resolve by saying, “To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same.”
One way to understand better the implications of zero, and the paths to arriving at zero, is to force the military and defense planning bureaucracies to engage with the logic of zero. As Perkovich and Acton observe, “None of today’s nuclear-armed states (and those depending on them for security guarantees) would commit to major proportional reduction in their arsenals without wellvetted studies by their national defense establishments.”34 War-games, planning scenarios, planning guidance, and other midproducts of the entire intelligence and military planning process should be informed by the notion that the United States is preparing for a non-nuclear future. There are a number of planning and analysis processes where the logic of zero and its implications can be examined:
• Defense Planning Scenarios
• Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR)35
• Defense Planning Guidance
• National Military Strategy
• Nuclear Posture Review
The Obama administration pushed the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) to “continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy” and to “continue concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.”36 This step, which ran contrary to the guidance given by President Bush before the last NPR,37 opened the door for strategists and planners to grapple seriously with the road to zero. Yet the importance of these simple words can be overstated, as the same list of NPR themes focus first on nuclear deterrence and extended deterrence (again a marked contrast to the 2001 NPR guidance from President George W. Bush, which stressed that the “Cold War approach to deterrence is no longer appropriate”—not because he wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but because many of his advisors sought justifications for, and the means to use, conventional and perhaps even nuclear weapons to fight U.S. enemies rather than deter them).38 Among the specific issues worthy of further study are:
• the low numbers problem, or whether the probability of a catastrophic nuclear event increases as fewer nuclear weapons exist;
• the impact of reducing the numbers and types of nuclear weapons on deterrence and extended deterrence, both in general and in specific regional or dyadic relationships;
• war-fighting without nuclear weapons;
• the effects of reducing nuclear weapons and platforms explicitly designed to deliver nuclear weapons on the conventional force; and
• identification of specific points along the path toward zero which present the greatest challenges or vulnerabilities to U.S. national and international security.
It is highly likely that not all the answers from such explorations will support the logic of zero. In fact, arguing deductively, theorists have already called several of the most important assumptions of proponents of disarmament into question. But understanding the problems and nuances of the process will allow negotiators to find ways around the difficulties and to work with other countries to overcome vulnerabilities.
The politics of getting to zero are extremely complex, both internationally and within the domestic arena. Internationally, the United States and like-minded nations will have to overcome the suspicions of other nuclear states that somehow proposals to reduce, if not eliminate, nuclear weapons will leave them vulnerable. Potential risks include but are not limited to:
• the possibility that rival states will maintain their arsenals even as a build-down is negotiated and implemented;
• the opportunity for other, currently non-nuclear capable, states to take advantage of the reductions to develop, accelerate, or regenerate their own nuclear programs;
• the danger that the period, even if it can be measured in decades, preceding
• the implementation of agreements to eliminate will be destabilizing; and
• the possibility that states without the resources to field large and technologically advanced conventional military capabilities will fear putting themselves at a permanent disadvantage if the world agrees to renounce nuclear weapons (no matter how their immediate security requirements change with time).
Many nations will be wary of American intentions. As the nation with the most powerful conventional military, and both the national will and economic capacity to outspend most if not all rivals or even groups of rivals, the United States might use nuclear disarmament to permanently lock in its own conventional superiority. For potential U.S. adversaries, adopting asymmetric military strategies against the possibility of American military intervention will be made much more difficult without the ready-made solution of acquiring nuclear weapons and delivery systems.39
It may be even harder to generate support for the logic of zero within the U.S. national security community than to gain the assent of other governments including both nuclear and non-nuclear powers. Nuclear weapons, even more than the vast economic, political, diplomatic, and conventional military resources available to the U.S. government, remain the foundation of America’s superpower status in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Proposing deep cuts in the number of nuclear weapons, and even the elimination of nuclear weapons altogether, challenges the received wisdom of many decades. For the Obama administration and its successors, any steps toward arms control much less toward nuclear zero will also stimulate intense opposition from the most conservative elements of U.S. society, including for example, the so-called Tea Party supporters who tend to vote Republican.
Beyond the concerns of strategists and politicians, resistance is likely to come from the strategic, military, intelligence, and defense industrial/scientific-engineering communities. All have vested interests in maintaining the status quo rather than moving forward into an even more uncertain future.
The military is an interesting case. On the one hand, since the end of the Cold War nuclear weapons have played a reduced role in U.S. strategic thought, at least as evidenced by national strategy documents. In the past two decades defense planning documents have only rarely focused on the role of nuclear weapons. Deterrence, while oft-referenced, has given way first to shaping the international security environment and then, during the presidency of George W. Bush, to more ambitious instruments such as prevention; in fact, even recent references to deterrence have concentrated less on nuclear deterrence than on the role of conventional forces. The Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review sought both conventional analogs to nuclear deterrence and greater reliance on ballistic missile defense as guarantors of U.S. national security. Military transformation, one of the driving trends in defense planning and budgeting since the Clinton years, is somewhat remarkable for its relative silence on nuclear weapons.40 Transformation advocates even argue that, properly employed, conventional weapons can achieve the same effects as nuclear weapons without the political and moral baggage.
On the other hand, throughout the administration of George W. Bush the nuclear weapons community waged a campaign to maintain and even expand the roles and mission of nuclear weapons. For example, the nuclear laboratories fought to develop and fund small nuclear weapons, so-called bunker busters capable of destroying hardened facilities. If and when the U.S. armed services are called upon to strike another nation’s nuclear arsenal and production facilities, bunker busters and the other parts of the U.S. reconnaissance strike complex will ease the difficult mission of destroying hardened facilities. Thus if the military has not focused on nuclear tactics and strategy in recent years, its focus on strike operations, as embodied, for example, in the establishment and strengthening of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), indicates the continued importance of nuclear missions to the American military.
Nuclear missions, and the vast infrastructure required to sustain the forces and capabilities required to carry out those missions, constitute a significant portion of U.S. defense spending, especially if the mission is defined broadly to include offensive and defensive weapons, as well as the technical communities and personnel that support them. In 2008 the United States spent roughly $52 billion in aggregate on various programs related to nuclear weapons.41 Moreover, annual spending figures do not do justice to the capital investment in nuclear programs that remain part of the investment stock supporting U.S. national security. Between 1940, the year the Manhattan Project was initiated, and 1996, Steven I. Schwartz estimates the United States spent a minimum of $5,821 billion (constant 1996 dollars) on nuclear weapons programs.42 Future spending remains uncertain, given possible changes based on programmatic decisions by the Obama administration, the recommendations of the Nuclear Posture Review, and the Quadrennial Defense Review, not to mention congressional appropriations and other military decisions great and small. Potentially the costs will remain in the $50 billion per year range if policies remain unchanged, or even rise if projects like the NNSA “Complex Transformation” plan to undertake an extensive, multi-billion dollar investment in new nuclear weapons facilities and new nuclear warhead designs costing, according to Department of Energy estimates, more than $200 billion over two or three decades, go forward.43
According to the Center for Strategy and Budgetary Assessments,
Deeper cuts in nuclear forces could also yield significant budgetary savings. . . . Over the longer term, moving toward a force of some 1,000–1,500 nuclear warheads could yield budgetary savings of several billion dollars a year. These savings would be due to both lower operations and support costs and acquisition costs for the Department of Defense, as well as lower costs related to maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile for the Department of Energy.44
Yet while taxpayers and deficit hawks might view such savings as a reason to support the logic of zero, the reverse logic is that such cuts would result in canceling programs and contracts, weakening the prestige and influence of specific military missions, communities, and their associated organizational support, and putting less public funds in the hands of defense firms. Moreover, the weapons laboratories and associated infrastructure are spread over many states and, more important, congressional districts. As we have learned from many defense programs over the years, from the B-1B bomber to the F-22 to various naval shipbuilding programs, senators and congressmen are more than willing to use their votes to protect programs that support local jobs. There is little reason to assume that when it comes time to make serious cuts in various nuclear-related programs, legislators will remain any less vigilant.
The point is not to emphasize the expense of nuclear weapons, but to indicate the economic, budgetary, and commercial importance of nuclear weapons to the U.S. economy, the military services, and various other government agencies such as the Department of Energy, and to those defense industrial firms contracting with the U.S. government to provide the various products and services required to maintain the nuclear weapons arsenal. With large sums at stake, programmatic cuts, whether dictated by strategic decisions like that to pursue the logic of zero or by efforts to reduce defense spending, will be resisted by both government and private sector organizations.
The intelligence community plays an important if under-recognized role on debates over nuclear weapons and arms control. Recent high-level scenarios and futures work make assumptions about the future of nuclear states, proliferation, and the status of American nuclear forces. Further, much of the intelligence infrastructure to include satellite systems and listening posts was developed during the Cold War. It is optimized for providing strategic warning against nuclear attacks and monitoring other nuclear weapons states. Approaching zero will require new modes of monitoring and verification, as well as dealing with increasingly obsolete systems and processes. Given the new security challenges that have developed since 9/11, there is little doubt the intelligence community can find ways to reallocate resources. But given the long lead times for deploying complex technological systems such as satellite constellations, planning and procurement must occur sooner rather than later to prepare for a world in which nuclear arsenals dwindle below the 1,000-warhead mark for Russia and the United States, and hopefully, to smaller or nonexistent numbers in other existing nuclear or threshold states. Revelations in late 2010 documenting how North Korea and, to some extent, Iran have managed to surprise the U.S. and other international observers with the progress of their nuclear weapons manufacturing capabilities point to the importance of improving intelligence collection and analysis.
Implementation of the president’s wider agenda for a nuclear-free world depends on the willingness of key nuclear states to press forward, the ability of the president and his senior staff members to push his agenda with the executive branch and the armed forces, and, perhaps most significantly, to shape the attitudes and actions of key congressional national security experts such as Richard Lugar to support the president’s policies. Already the groundwork is being laid, but much remains to be accomplished and several important political choices about how to proceed remain open.
Under President G. W. Bush, Secretary of State Rice often spoke of but barely pursued a notion of “Transformative Diplomacy,” especially with regard to foreign aid programs. For then-secretary Rice transformation meant, among other things, greater inclusion of the recipients of U.S. assistance into decision-making. Both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton now have an opportunity to put real transformation into practice by leading international efforts toward nuclear zero. Attaining international “buy in” for the logic of zero will require a major, well-publicized, internationally legitimate forum—the classic bully pulpit. In this case transformative should mean inclusion and transparency. It will also require sustained presidential effort and attention to the domestic dimensions of nuclear disarmament. The U.S. military, the nuclear weapons industrial complex, and their congressional supporters must be convinced that their fears of the consequences of zero are overstated or can be overcome. One way to begin this long process will be to study seriously the specific consequences of nuclear disarmament using the various analytic techniques (war gaming, operations research) and collective decision-making (NPR, QDR, among others) that have guided defense planning since at least the McNamara era.
This chapter represents my professional judgments and in no way reflects the policies of the U.S. Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense or the U.S. government. I would like to thank Judith Reppy and Catherine Kelleher as editors, as well as all participants at the 2009 ISODARCO conference, for useful suggestions. George Quester, Andrew L. Ross, James Acton, Andrew Winner, Thomas Nichols, Jeffrey Arthur Larsen, James M. Smith, James J. Wirtz, Duane Bratt, and Jonathan Pollack graciously read earlier versions of this chapter. As usual, all mistakes are mine and mine alone.
1. Bryan Bender, “Nuclear Agenda Draws Scrutiny: Obama to Seek Largest Cuts in US, Russian Warheads,” Boston Globe, 22 February 2009, p. 1.
2. George Perkovich and James M. Acton, “Rebutting the Standard Arguments against Disarmament,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (15 July 2009), at http://www.the-bulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/rebutting-the-standard-arguments-against-disarmament.
3. “McCain Calls for Slashing U.S. Nuclear Arsenal,” CNNPolitics.com (27 May 2008), at http://www.cfr.org/bios/662/john_mccain.html#22.
4. “McCain Supports Goal of a World without Nuclear Weapons,” floor statement by Senator John McCain—A World without Nuclear Weapons (3 June 2009), at http://www. ploughshares.org/news-analysis/news/mccain-supports-goal-world-without-nuclearweapons.
5. Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal “The Logic of Zero,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2008): 80–95.
6. See, for example, George P. Shultz et al., eds., Reykjavik Revisited: Steps toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2008).
7. Randy Rydell, “The Future of Nuclear Arms: A World United and Divided by Zero,” Arms Control Today 39, no. 3 (April 2009): 21–25.
8. Scholars, including Robert Jervis and James Fearon, argue that costly signals reveal more about a state’s intentions than does cheap talk; the nature of signaling intentions and how they are interpreted by other actors, however, remains an open research program. Some scholars even support sending cheap signals under specific conditions and within certain issue areas. See Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 3 (September 1994): 577–92.
9. One excellent contribution to the vast and growing literature on the problem of credible commitments among nation states is Kurt Taylor Gaubatz, “Democratic States and Commitment in International Relations,” International Organization 50, no. 1 (Winter, 1996): 109–39.
10. George Perkovich and James M. Acton, “What’s Next?” in Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, ed. George Perkovich and James M. Acton (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment Report, February 2009), p. 316.
11. The proposed hold should include, temporarily, important proposals such as efforts to restart work on a comprehensive fissile material treaty. See Arend Meerburg and Frank N. von Hippel, “Complete Cutoff: Designing a Comprehensive Fissile Material Treaty,” Arms Control Today (March 2009): 16.
12. While ideally the Obama administration could have begun with a clean slate in bilateral negotiations with Russia, the administration chose to pursue a follow-on to START I and START II, and there is no going back. In reality, achieving a modus vivendi with Russia, especially if it somehow includes agreement on pushing for nuclear disarmament, may pressure other states to attend a world summit and, better yet, play a constructive role.
13. Daalder and Lodal, “The Logic of Zero,” p. 81.
14. Peter Dombrowski and Rodger Payne, “The Emerging Consensus for Preventive War,” Survival 48 (Summer 2006): 115–36.
15. Amy F. Woolf, Nuclear Weapons and US National Security: A Need for New Weapons Programs? CRS report for Congress (15 September 2003), p. 2.
16. For the full text of President Barack Obama’s remarks at Hradčany Square, Prague, Czech Republic, 5 April 2009, see http://prague.usembassy.gov/obama.html.
17. Steven Pifer, Beyond START: Negotiating the Next Step in U.S. and Russian Strategic Nuclear Arms Reductions, Brookings Policy Paper no. 15 (May 2009), p. 5.
18. “Nuclear Arms Resolution Passed at UN Summit,” Arms Control Today (October 2009): 22–23.
19. For a sober discussion of the possibility of additional nuclear programs in view of recent North Korean nuclear and missile tests, see Christopher W. Hughes, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons: Implications for the Nuclear Ambitions of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan,” Asia Policy 3 (January 2007): 75–104, at http://asiapolicy.nbr.org.
20. The “Washington Summit,” convened in April 2009, while useful in focusing attention on the need to control access to fissile materials, was far more modest than the world summit discussed here.
21. Lawrence Freedman, “Nuclear Disarmament: From a Popular Movement to an Elite Project, and Back Again?” in Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, p. 144, at http://www. carnegieendowment.org/files/abolishing_nuclear_weapons_debate.pdf.
22. Stephen D. Krasner, “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (Spring 1982). Reprinted in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
23. On April 1, 2009, President Obama met with President Medvedev and agreed “to begin bilateral intergovernmental negotiations to work out a new, comprehensive, legally binding agreement on reducing and limiting strategic offensive arms to replace the START Treaty.” Joint Statement by Dmitriy A. Medvedev, president of the Russian Federation, and Barack Obama, president of the United States of America, Regarding Negotiations on Further Reductions in Strategic Offensive Arms. For more context, see Cole Harvey, “Russia, U.S. Seek START Successor by Year End,” Arms Control Today (April 2009).
24. John Daniszewski, “Iranians Defend Nuclear Rights,” Los Angeles Times, 7 March 2006.
25. Abbas William Samii, “The Iranian Nuclear Issue and Informal Networks,” Naval War College Review (Winter 2006): 74.
26. My thinking here was shaped by, among many others, James Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” Theory and Society 29, no. 4 (August 2000): 507–48.
27. Pifer, Beyond START, p. 9.
28. “These new nuclear weapons are sometimes presented as generic ‘bunker busters,’ including such targets as command centers, for example, but when specifics are included, chemical and biological weapons in particular are likely to be cited.” Ivan Oelrich, Missions for Nuclear Weapons after the Cold War, Federation of American Scientists Occasional Paper no. 3 (January 2005), p. 36, at http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/ non-proliferation_and_arms_control/missionsaftercwrptfull.pdf.
29. Jonathan Medalia, “The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program: Background and Current Developments,” CRS Report to Congress (updated 12 September 2008), p. CRS-1, at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL32929.pdf.
30. House Report 108–792, “Making Appropriations for Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2005, and for Other Purposes.” Congressional language, at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/ ?&db_id=cp108&r_n=hr792.108&sel=TOC_2807988&.
31. The RRW study conducted by the Jason study group outlined the needed measures. It concluded, “The absence of new nuclear explosive testing increases the need for experiments, computational tools, and improved scientific understanding of the connection of the results from such experiments and simulations to the existing nuclear explosive test data. Even when suitably validated simulations can predict device failure, and provide reliable estimates of margins and uncertainties, a continued non-nuclear experimental basis will be required for certification of any new design.” See “Reliable Replace Warhead: Executive Summary,” JSR-07-336E (7 September 2007), p. 5, at http://fas. org/irp/agency/dod/jason/rrw.pdf.
32. I am grateful for Judith Reppy’s insight here. See also George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, “How to Protect Our Nuclear Deterrent,” Wall Street Journal, 19 January 2010, for ideas along these lines that draw on the work of the Strategic Posture Commission led by former defense secretaries Perry and James R. Schlesinger and on a Jason technical study commissioned by the National Nuclear Security Administration in the Department of Energy.
33. Quoted on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website, at http://www. globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/rnep.htm.
34. Perkovich and Acton, “What’s Next?” p. 318.
35. William S. Cohen, “Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review,” Washington, DC, Department of Defense, May 1997, Section I. Congress directed DOD to perform the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review as a method to conduct a “fundamental and comprehensive examination of America’s defense needs.”
36. Nuclear Posture Review 2010 Fact Sheet, “Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) Background,” 6 August 2009, p. 1, at http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/193/ NPR_Background.pdf.
37. The out-briefing of the 2001 NPR offered a more ambiguous statement: “Deploy the lowest number of nuclear weapons consistent with the security requirements of the US, its allies and friends.” Department of Defense, “Findings of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review,” 9 January 2002, slide 6, at http://www.defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/briefing-slide/120/020109-D-6570C-001.pdf.
38. Ibid.
39. At the most simple level, asymmetric strategies “attack vulnerabilities not appreciated by the United States and capitalize on limited U.S. preparations against such threats.” Often they involved nuclear, biological, or chemical threats or, in more recent usage, terrorism. See, for example, Bruce W. Bennett, Christopher Twomey, and Gregory F. Treverton, What Are Asymmetric Strategies? DB-246-OSD (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp., 1999).
40. For one example, a Congressional Research Service review of U.S. Department of Defense transformation efforts barely mentions the U.S. nuclear arsenal. When it refers to nuclear weapons at all it is to point out the reasons why advocates argue that transformation is necessary; for example, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by potential U.S. adversaries. Ronald O’Rourke, “Defense Transformation: Background and Oversight Issues for Congress,” CRS Report to Congress (updated 4 April 2005), at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/crs/crs_rl32238_apr05.pdf.
41. Stephen I. Schwartz with Deepti Choubey, Nuclear Security Spending: Assessing Costs, Examining Priorities (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009), at http://carnegieendowment.org/files/nuclear_security_spending_complete_high.pdf.
42. Steven I. Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998). The table estimating the details of historical spending on nuclear weapons programs can be found at http://www.brookings.edu/projects/archive/nucweapons/figure1.aspx.
43. William D. Hartung, “Nuclear Bailout: A Critique of the Department of Energy’s Plans for a New Nuclear Weapons Complex,” New America Foundation, Submitted in Conjunction with the Public Comment Period on the Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (SPEIS) for the Department of Energy’s “Complex Transformation” Plan (25 March 2008), at http://www.newamerica.net/files/Nuclear_ Bailout.pdf.
44. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “Cost of Defense Plans and Forces: Nuclear Forces and Proliferation,” at http://www.csbaonline.org/2006-1/2. DefenseBudget/Nuclear_Forces.shtml.