The French magazine Défense Nationale asked me to submit an article about the new U.S. National Military Strategy published by the Bush administration in March 2006 and how it relates to the so-called preemption doctrine announced by the administration in 2002. The article is included in the July 2006 issue which focuses on the nuclear deterrence debate following the announcement by French president Jacques Chiraq in January that France has adjusted its nuclear posture to target regional adversaries armed with weapons of mass destruction. The magazine is published by the Committee for National Defence Studies, an independent research institution which includes several retired generals and admirals from the French military.

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The Pentagon is considering acquiring up to four types of Reliable Replacement Warheads (RRW), twice as many as reported so far, according to an overview discovered by the Federation of the American Scientists on a Pentagon web site.

The Department of Energy told Congress in April that Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were working on “an RRW design” for completion later in 2006. The Washington Post added last month that a Senate subcommittee had added $10 million to next year’s budget to fund a design of a second RRW.

According to the new DOD overview, which looks beyond 2030, the future nuclear weapons stockpile would be made up of 4-6 different types of warheads (down from nine types today). A decision would be made mid-next decade about whether to have a mix of RRWs and existing warhead types or transition to an all RRW-stockpile.

In an apparent response to the Bush administration’s decision to reduce reliance of reserve warheads and instead transition to a “responsive infrastructure” that will produce warheads when needed, the DOD plan envisions “steady-state production of warheads for deployment” in the long term.

The plan also forecasts decisions on developments of warheads for the next generation of nuclear weapon delivery systems (missiles and aircraft).

The U.S. nuclear stockpile currently contains approximately 10,000 nuclear warheads of nine principle designs: B61, W62, W76, W78, W80, B83, W84, W87 and W88. The Bush administration has decided to reduce the total stockpile “almost in half” which is estimated to leave a stockpile of some 6,000 warheads in 2012.

Visit the Pentagon web site.

There have been some legislative developments on the India-US nuclear deal. The results are not what I would like to have seen but I suppose it could have been worse. On 27 June, the House International Relations Committee approved their version of the bill 37 to 5. On 29 June the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16 to 2 in favor of their bill. Both bills give the administration and the Indians essentially everything they asked for except preapproval.
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Although the British government has promised a full and open public debate about the future of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, it has so far failed to explain what decisions need to be made, failed to provide a timetable for those decisions, and has refused to participate in a House of Commons Defence Committee inquiry on the future of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, according to a British parliamentary report. The report partially relies on research conducted by the FAS Nuclear Information Project for the SIPRI Yearbook.

Online overview of British nuclear forces

A Written Declaration presented in the European Parliament calls for the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from Europe by the end of 2006. The Declaration has until December 10 to gather support from at least half of the Parliament’s 732 members to be adopted and formally submitted to the US government. The initiative comes as Russia refused last week to discuss tactical nuclear weapons with the United States. Most European want the US to withdraw its remaining nuclear weapons from Europe.

Background report: U.S. Nuclear Weapons In Europe

In an op-ed in last Wednesday’s Washington Post, IAEA Secretary General Mohammad elBaradei endorsed the US-India nuclear deal without reservation. The Secretary makes several good points but he fails to demonstrate his assertion that the deal will help reach his own objectives.
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Thirty seven Nobel Laureates signed a letter opposing the administration’s proposed nuclear trade deal between India and the United States. The letter was released at a press briefing at the National Press Club yesterday.

The Federation of American Scientists was founded by scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bombs. The founders of FAS understood that the technology that made nuclear power possible and the technology that made nuclear weapons possible were inextricably entangled. One of the founding issues of the Federation was, therefore, openness and international inspection, if not control, of all the world’s nuclear facilities. They recognized that this was the only hope of avoiding wide-spread proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Here we are sixty years later and faced with the same issue. The Federation strongly supports improved economic, cultural, trade, academic, and security relations with India. We would like to see Chinese, as well as US, Russian, indeed, everyone’s nuclear arsenals dramatically reduced and eventually eliminated. The Indian-US nuclear deal further undermines the already weakened non-proliferation regime and pushes the world in the wrong direction, toward greater legitimacy of nuclear weapons.

The Federation of American Scientists is proud that thirty seven Nobel Laureates on its Board of Sponsors agreed to endorse this letter to Congress.

The Air Force has published a new report about the threat from ballistic and cruise missiles. The new report, Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat, presents the Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center’s (NASIC) assessment of current and emerging weapon systems deployed or under development by Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Syria and others.

Among the news in the report is a different and higher estimate for China’s future nuclear arsenal than was presented in the previous NASIC report from 2003. Whereas the previous assessment stated that China in 15 years will have 75-100 warheads on ICBMs capable of reaching the United States, the 2006 report states that this number will be “well over 100” warheads. NASIC also believes that a new Chinese cruise missile under development will have nuclear capability.

Also new is that NASIC reports that the Indian Agni I ballistic missile has not yet been deployed despite claims by the Indian government that the weapon was “inducted” into the Indian Army in 2004. Contrary to claims made by some media and experts, the NASIC report states that the Indian Bramos cruise missile does not have a nuclear capability. The Babur cruise missile under development by Pakistan, however, is assessed to have a nuclear capability.

A copy of the report, which was published in March 2006 and recently obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, is available in full along with previous versions here.

The Council on Foreign Relations just released a “Special Report,” U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation by Michael Levi and Charles Ferguson. Mike and Charles are first rate thinkers but I disagree with almost every aspect of their report.

The report is seductively misleading because many of the recommendations make good sense given the presumptions and context of the report. But the presumptions and context are wrong. So first, we need to step back and examine the context. The authors state early on that “…the Bush administration has stirred deep passions and put Congress in the seemingly impossible bind of choosing between approving the deal and damaging nuclear nonproliferation, or rejecting the deal and thereby setting back an important strategic relationship.” [p. 3] This is true, but the problem is with the deal, not the implementation.
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Almost 70 percent of people in European countries that currently store U.S. nuclear weapons want a Europe free of nuclear weapons, according to an opinion poll published by Greenpeace International. In contrast, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested in an interview with Der Spiegel last November that the Europeans want to keep U.S. nuclear weapons.

Question: “Do You Want Europe to be Free of Nuclear Weapons or Not?”

Background: U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe

Deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey was brought up in a debate in the Turkish Parliament today by Turkey’s former Ambassador to the United States, Sukru Elekdag. According to an article in the Turkish paper Hürriyet, Elekdag called attention to a report, US Nuclear Weapons In Europe, which asserts that the U.S. Air Force stores 90 nuclear bombs at the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.

The report was published one year ago, but the initiative by Elekdag, who represents the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is the first time the findings have been brought before the Tuskish Parliament. The Tuskish debate follows calls last year in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands for a withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe, something NATO and the Pentagon have rejected. Elekdag pointed out that nuclear weapons were removed from Greece only a few years ago and that Turkey’s continued allowance of U.S. nuclear bombs at Incirlik is hard to explain to Muslim and Arab neighbors.

In a whopper 231-page report published today, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission presented 60 specific recommendations for how to move the nonproliferation and disarmament agenda forward.

The recommendations are familiar to anyone involved in these matters over the past 50 years: reduce the danger of nuclear arsenals; prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; outlaw weapons of mass destruction; etc.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) was established in 2003 by the Swedish Government acting on a proposal by then United Nations Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala to present realistic proposals aimed at the greatest possible reduction of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. The Commission is chaired by Hans Blix, the former Executive Chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and includes among others William J. Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Jayantha Dhanapala, the former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, and Alexei G. Arbatov of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The Commission’s report uses the World Nuclear Forces overview co-produced by Federation of American Scientists for the SIPRI Yearbook to describe the status of existing nuclear arsenals, but the report does not dwell on past nuclear arms reductions which are often used by the nuclear weapon states to say they have done enough. Instead, the Commission calls for new and additional actions to curb existing weapons of mass destruction arsenals and prevent new ones from emerging. Commission chairman Hans Blix writes in the foreword that “the climate for agreements on arms control and disarmament has actually deteriorated” in recent years and “nuclear-weapon states no longer seem to take their commitment to nuclear disarmament seriously.”

That is certainly true. Nuclear disarmament has all but disappeared from the arms control agenda, and the nuclear weapons states instead use proliferation to justify their own nuclear weapons which they are busy modernizing and tailoring against the new enemies. Proliferators, in turn, use the offensive military postures of the nuclear weapon states as an excuse to develop their own nuclear weapons.

The Commission’s recommendations are a wide-ranging list of constraints that, if implemented, will constrain all actors, existing nuclear weapon states as well as proliferators. But from the outset, the report is strongly at odds with the policies of several of the major nuclear weapon states, particularly the United States. The Commission is unlikely to have many friends in the current White House, which will almost certainly reject its call for a revitalization of the “thirteen practical steps” to disarmament adopted at the 2000 nuclear nonproliferation treaty review conference, steps that have specifically been rejected by the Bush administration.

Other recommendations include a no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons, an idea the U.S. will almost certainly reject, as will many of the other nuclear powers. A no-first-use policy has been explicitly rejected by the United States and NATO, and Russia has abandoned its no-first-use policy. The report also calls for nuclear weapon states to abandon the practice of deploying nuclear forces in a triad of sea-, land- and air-based delivery platforms, something most of the nuclear powers insist is necessary. The Commission also wants nuclear weapon states to end deployment of nuclear weapons outside their own territories, an indirect call for a withdrawal of the remaining U.S. nuclear bombs from Europe.

With an eye to the new roles that existing nuclear weapon states are creating for their nuclear arsenals against proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, the Commission recommends that nuclear weapons states “refrain from developing nuclear weapons with new military capabilities or for new missions,” and they “must not adopt systems or doctrines that blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons or lower the nuclear threshold.”

Some of the Commission’s recommendations extend to indirect measures, such as a freeze on ballistic missile defense systems, a key priority for the United States and increasingly also other countries. The Commission also wants assurances that Iran will not be attacked or forced to change government in the conflict over the country’s clandestine nuclear weapons program.

Surprisingly, the report does not recommend that India and Pakistan join the non-proliferation treaty, although their absence is said to hurt the regime. Instead, both countries are urged to join a number of other initiatives such as the Comprehensive test Ban Treaty.

The report’s greatest weakness may be that it doesn’t sufficiently incorporate “the other side” of the debate and therefore runs the risk of being seen as a manifesto of arms control proposals from the past that “preach to the choir” rather than presenting new ideas on how to move the agenda forward.

On the other hand, the fact that the Bush administration’s policies – and those of several other nuclear powers i.e. Russia – are so at odds with a revitalized disarmament and nonproliferation agenda suggests how necessary the Commission’s recommendations are. The United States has considerable leverage on these issues, the report acknowledges, but all countries – not only the proliferators – must accept constraints on their own operations if the disarmament and nonproliferation agenda is to move forward. The alternative is indefinite insecurity for all.

Full WMD Commission report