Now, The Arms Control Hard Part Posted by David Shorr

In a New York Times op-ed today, Philip Taubman directs our attention toward a nexis of politics and bureaucracy that could make or break the bold nuclear policy outlined in President Obama's Prague speech. The Nuclear Posture Review is a periodic reassessment of how US nuclear forces fit into our overall security strategy -- i.e. the strategic objectives for which the weapons, their deployment, and their disarmament should be tailored. As Taubman points out, the combination of inertia and vested interests can doom major policy shifts before they even get started, a problem President Reagan encountered when he tried to set ambitious disarmament goals in his second term. It is crucial, therefore, for President Obama to "make sure it reflects his thinking," as Taubman stresses.

As the president has made clear, a primary strategic objective is to keep additional countries from acquiring nuclear arsenals, and upholding the United States NPT obligation to disarm is essential. Here's how he put it during his Moscow visit this week:

This is not about singling out individual nations -- it's about the responsibilities of all nations. If we fail to stand together, then the NPT and the Security Council will lose credibility, and international law will give way to the law of the jungle. And that benefits no one. As I said in Prague, rules must be binding, violations must be punished, and words must mean something.

In other words, the United States' insistence on compliance from non-nuclear weapon states like Iran is undermined if the US itself temporizes. The thrust of US nuclear policy should be to downplay the usefulness of nuclear weapons and reinforce a stigma that they are too horrific to serve any valid military purpose but deterence. A 2008 summary report from former Stanley Foundation colleague Matt Martin's extensive project on US nuclear policy captured the problem well. Noting that the last Nuclear Posture Review by the Bush Administration in 2001 focused on freedom of action and leaving options open, the Stanley Foundation project saw many counerproductive consequences:

In a strategic environment that should seek to lower the salience of nuclear weapons, this deliberate vagueness and imprecision could be interpreted in ways that prove destabilizing and counterproductive. It continues to entrench nuclear weapons as fundamental to state security, reinforcing this notion among other nuclear and nonnuclear weapon states. It removes the distinction given nuclear weapons as a special “class” of weaponry, putting them on a continuum with other instruments of military power and inviting perceptions that the nuclear use threshold has been lowered. It raises the possibility that new nuclear missions and capability could be developed by the United States, encouraging others to consider the same, and thus increasing, rather than decreasing, the overall salience of nuclear weapons.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that nuclear arms are too desructive for any military purpose other than deterrence or retaliation. Let's hope that the posture review keeps sight of this simple moral reality and doesn't cloud the picture with tortured and technical rationalizations.

Comments

[Zathras]

Absent from this commentary is any recognition of the countries seeking to acquire nuclear arsenals, or of the reasons they want them. If the United States "temporizes," we might well think Iran or North Korea would feel justified in seeking to develop nuclear weapons, if they thought like we do. If the United States does not temporize, these nations would feel able to curtail their nuclear programs; Pakistan would feel able to forego expanding its arsenal, and so forth. The question is whether there is any reason at all to believe that any of these governments, or any others, reason in this way.

There is not. No reason. None. Nor is it likely that President Obama's eloquence will persuade them to reason in this way. There are European government officials, representing countries that for their own reasons have no interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, who do reason in this way, but they are not the audience that matters.

This wasn't really what Taubman's article was about, anyway. He was concerned that the Obama admininstration might be locked in by those in the Pentagon (primarily) committed to the status quo on nuclear weapons, as Clinton was 15 years ago. Continuation of the status quo means keeping a larger nuclear arsenal than we need, and committing more of our military establishment to maintaining that arsenal than we have to at a time of heavy demands on the non-nuclear military. Taubman isn't wrong about the importance of the Posure Review, or about the Obama administration putting its imprint on it before publication. To get anywhere, though, that imprint is going to have to be grounded in American strategic and budgetary realities, not a lot of airy-fairy ideas about how our example will encourage disarmament elsewhere.

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There is not. No reason. None. Nor is it likely that President Obama's eloquence will persuade them to reason in this way. There are European government officials, representing countries that for their own reasons have no interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, who do reason in this way, but they are not the audience that matters.
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