The Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Landmine
Defense officials are writing a new U.S. nuclear policy that could blow up President Obama's declared agenda. The White House must reassert its control.
The Nuclear Posture Review, or NPR, will be issued at the end of the year, but Obama's defense officials are briefing others in the administration this week, hoping to lock in their policies before the end of the month.
Why should you care? Joan Rohlfing, vice-president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative headed by Sam Nunn and Ted Turner, explained in a speech before the Arms Control Association May 20:
What comes out of this posture review is going to help reshape our global norms, practices and the legal context in which not just the United States but our allies and the rest of the world develop their own thinking and approaches to reducing the nuclear threat. So the stakes are high. The NPR really, really matters. And this president will probably have one shot at getting it right, certainly in the first term.
That is why Center for American Progress Senior Analyst Andrew Grotto and I urged in our report last year that the review "be a strategy-driven exercise guided by a vision for nuclear weapons policy elaborated by the president." We warned, "A review process conducted without a sense for the ultimate destinations is unlikely to produce any meaningful changes in the posture."
But there is minimal involvement of the White House and other agencies, including the State Department. Rather than shaping a policy to prevent the 21st century threats of nuclear terrorism and new nuclear states, the Pentagon reviewers are defending Cold War architectures.
If the Pentagon's civilian officials continue on their current course, the new Obama nuclear policy will be Bush Light. Same doctrine, same weapons, slightly tweaked. This would duplicate the failure of the posture review during the Clinton administration, which made only minor adjustments to the policy of Bush 41.
It would also make a mockery of the agenda Obama called for in the campaign, in his statements with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and most famously, in his historic speech in Prague on April 5:
The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War... So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons....we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.... we will negotiate a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians this year.... this will set the stage for further cuts, and we will seek to include all nuclear weapons states in this endeavor.
...My administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty....Countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them...We need real and immediate consequences for countries caught breaking the rules or trying to leave the treaty without cause.
The Pentagon review nods to Obama's vision, but takes as its starting point the deeply flawed U.S. Nuclear Strategic Posture Commission report chaired by Jim Schlesinger and Bill Perry. The commission -- stacked with far-right nuclear ideologues -- never developed a real consensus. The hardliners dominated the process, which almost collapsed, salvaged in the end by a report that spliced together very different agendas. Conservatives carry the report around like holy script, but few in Washington take it seriously outside of the Heritage Foundation...and the Pentagon.
Pentagon officials have cherry-picked the president's agenda. Their main themes are not to prevent nuclear terrorism and proliferation, but to "maintain a safe, secure, effective and reliable nuclear deterrent" and "maintain extended deterrence."
This last theme is particularly insidious. It emerged during the Commission deliberations (I was a member of one of the expert advisory panels) as a way to justify keeping thousands of nuclear weapons. The argument goes that if we reduce our forces and/or if we do not use our nuclear weapons to deter any attack on our allies (particularly Japan), even by conventional weapons, they will go nuclear.
There are ultra-nationalist Japanese defense officials who say this, including the former head of the Air Force who wants Japan to go nuclear now. But this is not the view of the Japanese people or leading politicians. Yukio Hatoyama, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party that is likely to win the election later this month, said August 6, "Realizing a nuclear-free world as called for by U.S. President Obama is exactly the moral mission of our country as the only atomic-bombed state."
Similarly, Japan's leading newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, last week urged President Obama to use his chairing of the UN Security Council on September 24 to spread the "non-nuclear umbrella," urging a resolution by "the Security Council permanent members, which are all nuclear powers, to guarantee they will not use nuclear arms to attack countries without nuclear capability."
The posture review authors need more inputs like this, to balance the pressures Pentagon civilian officials are feeling from defense contractors, conservatives and the nuclear bureaucracy. Instead of trying to use the review to position the administration to be "tough on defense," they should redefine what tough actually means.
They should start by answering the most important questions of all: What are nuclear weapons for? The answer should be clear: Nuclear weapons are only useful for deterring the use of nuclear weapons by other nations. Justifying any other mission increases the threats to American security.
It is time to take Rohlfing's advice, before it is too late:
The process of the Nuclear Posture Review must be driven by the president and his staff...This should not be left solely to the Department of Defense. There are some very good people at the Department of Defense, but again, because of the bureaucratic inertia, it's not clear that a process that is exclusively DOD driven will end up in the right place, even if they have people from other agencies at the working level plugged into their working groups, which I know they do.
In the end, these are the president's weapons and it's going to take presidential leadership for him to move this forward.
Amen.
Follow Joe Cirincione on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Cirincione
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Who can blame Iran for wanting nuclear weapons given the way the Pentagon acts?
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Thank you for your comments. Some may think I have left out information in order to make my case. On the contrary, there is so much more to say. Here, for example is an fuller excerpt from Asahi Shimbun:
The credibility of Japan's nonnuclear diplomacy would be badly damaged if Tokyo emphasizes the importance of nuclear deterrence too much and obstructs Obama's efforts to reduce the role of nuclear weapons and promote nuclear disarmament. Even if it wants to keep nuclear deterrence intact for the time being, Japan should adopt a policy of promoting the nonnuclear umbrella.…..[including] a Security Council resolution that bans nuclear attacks against nonnuclear countries in the NPT camp. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has said that it is possible for the Security Council permanent members, which are all nuclear powers, to guarantee they will not use nuclear arms to attack countries without nuclear capability. Such a Security Council resolution should be adopted as soon as possible.
http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200908070047.html
This is not the time to change our nuclear posture. After the unsettling circumstnnces we are in, abate, then it becomes possible. When there is no threat, one can reduce, Right now, Communist China is paying the bills. Isn't that so?
wish we could just dump the good old boys in the pentagon and the good old boys in congress and start anew..these people are not what democracy is all about..
We have learned long time ago that the president and his administration do not matter much when it comes to the really important issues. Corporations have taken over and they can hardly fit behind the curtain of the capitalist democracy charade. Democracy must be taken to the boardrooms of the corporations beyond a certain size threshold. At present the world is ruled by a unified fractal of corporate dictatorships. They are all united around money and power. What can we expect from such a power structure?
Even Bob Mcnamara saw it as insane to retain thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons.
Gee, after Japan became USSR (Russia) depository for its weapons grade plutonium, (how many tons?) it would probably take the new nationalist Japan reorganized all of 10 to 15 minutes to arm its ICBMs with Russia's plutonium derived nuclear warheads and redo WW2. And if we give nukes to Germany, after all the Third Reich was neck and neck in development with the US, then we can all erlive our worst WW2 nightmares, and with Red China armed and the Taliban through Pakistan and ad infinitum while Our Obama says whatever his particular crowd may want to hear.
Paranoid much?
Can the national security establishment (Pentagon, CIA, NSA) be brought under societal control and be made accountable to voters?
There is a lot of paranoia and vested interests.(many Cheney-like characters)
Yet it would be a great achievement of the Obama administration if if this establishment was somewhat less in the cast of Dr. Strangelove.
Only with well carried riding crops
I might believe that were an unlikely strangelovian scenario if President Obama had the authority not yet granted him by the shadow government to change any members of the Joint Chiefs, SECDEF, NSA. He is a captive of the corporatists IMO.
So learn to stop worrying and love the bo mb?
America has a nuclear arsenal of over 10,000 weapons and nearly 2,000 remain on hair-trigger alert ever since the end of the Cold War.
An estimated 150 – 240 tactical nuclear weapons remain based in 5 NATO countries and the United States is the only country with nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil.
American taxpayers provide over $54 billion annually to maintain WMD's, which is but a drop in the bucket of the overall U.S. military spending.
The U.S. is also a co-conspirator in international nuclear apartheid and major collaborator in Israel's INEFFECTIVE policy of nuclear ambiguity-for that genie got out of the bottle in 1986 with Vanunu's photos of Israel's underground WMD facility that has never allowed IAEA inspectors into.
"Words must mean something [and] violence and injustice must be confronted by standing together as free nations, as free people…Human destiny will be what we make of it."-President Obama
learn lots more: VANUNU ARCHIVES:
http://www.wearewideawake.org
As a former military analyst who specialized (during the "Cold War") in understanding and teaching about deterrence I have to remind you that Mutual Assured Destruction as a security strategy only works when all sides are credibly armed to retaliate and credibly rational enough to be deterred. Modern terrorist organizations/states are neither. But, as long as we have a large arsenal, we are marginally both (I do not apologize for claiming that the West (and that includes the Russians) are rational). Simplistic calls for disarmament are just that, simplistic, easy to understand and wrong. Unless you are willing to expend the national treasure to hunt down and destroy all the nuclear weapons that the terrorists have or might get, you are playing a fool's game if you disarm. And there is no moral equivalence AT ALL between the West and the enemies of freedom who confront the world, primarily through confrontation with the US. Having said all that, if the Pentagon is going to trot out deterrence as a strategy, they have not learned the lessons about what makes deterrence work. And then I would be afraid.
Ahh. A person who understands human nature and reality. A voice of reason, and not naive wishfulness.
So, terrorists are not credibly rational enough to be deterred but we need to maintain our large nuclear stockpiles in order to deter the terrorists. You know, the ones who can't be deterred because they're not rational.
Got it.
B-52G Aircraft Commander, 2nd Bomb Wing, 1989-1992
and if we're insane enough to understand that logic then we're clearly not insane?
The Startegic Missle Wing of the USAF were (and still is) instrumental in keeping Soviet Missiles in their silos. The Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and many regimes around the world with or without such arsenals never were, never will be our friends. Those who believe that simply putting down our arms will result in others doing the same are simply full of misplaced hope. I lived on one of these bases. Some people forget the Soviets tried to move missiles onto Cuba and such is why Castro has been punished since. Some acts are unforgiveable and that was one.
There is a level of simplistic thinking that runs through certain elements of civilian society. This over simplification is reflected by some who believe that a military response to the events of 9-11 was not nec. or unjustified. Although disagree(d) with tactics/timing/preperation-a military response was justified.
The Japanese started the War in the pacific, were allied with the Nazi's, and sd remember that they brought the nuclear weapons upon themselves by attacking Pearl Harbor. They cd. have joined the allies but choose their sides. More were killed by traditional weapons, the Japanese military was barbaric, either way, Japan was going to be bombed until they submitted-maybe the nuclear drop saved more lives on both sides.
Some realities are simply too ugly and clear cut for some to accept or stomach.
OK, you win. China's evil. NOW can we stop moving our factories there?
The genie is now out of the bottle. The US set out to create it and then reasoned to use it. It will come back to haunt the US by being used on the US ... unless it's TOTAL ban is imposed and the ability to re-create it is abandoned. Sadly, we will only realize this after the fact. We humans never gave up any weapon we invented. Isn't that what the 2nd amendment is about????
Yeah maybe we could all disarm like every one did at the end of World War 1-- you know 'the War to End all Wars."
If the only purpose of Nuclear Weapons is to deter their use by other Nuclear powers, why is acquisition of them by terrorists such an issue?
Frankly, in addition to 'mutually assured destruction' value, nuclear weapons inspire terror. While certainly another reason for getting rid of them...getting it done requires more than disarmament agreements among the major powers.
Joe is right on the mark about Japan. I just concluded a week-long, interview-packed trip to discuss Japanese views on extended deterrence with Japanese officials in the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Diet. I also spoke with retired officials and leading security experts in Japanese think tanks and universities. Japan is lobbying the Pentagon not to change the posture, but the President should know that no one in Japan, left right or center, believes that if the US makes the changes in the NPR needed to realize the vision President Obama set out in Prague, Japan's security community will accept it. Japan is not going to "go nuclear". It is a straw man; a gross exaggeration of legitimate Japanese concerns about US commitment to Japan's security that is being used by nuclear warriors in the Pentagon to preserve their own preferences, and defeat the President's disarmament initiative before it even begins.
Japan never had any military ambitions
Well, there was that little spat back in the 1940s....
if the insurnace and the pharma and AMA can bully obama around,
why not the military - intelligence industry?
they have the real weapons and real intelligence to fight the people with.
How sad that a post of this importance garners only a couple of posts. This report is but the latest example of why Obama is a total fraud, and his change you can believe in is a total joke.
but not terribly funny...
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