Do you remember what Defense Secretary Robert Gates said – way back in December 2008, when he worked for President George W. Bush – about the strategic arms negotiations the Bush Administration had begun with Russia to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) of 1991? Gates declared that “there is a real possibility of going down below the 1,700 to 2,200 deployed warheads” range set by the 2002 Moscow Treaty. He warned, however, that there were limits on how far the United States could probably go: “.´Ï&²Ô²ú²õ±è; By a remarkable coincidence, as the Obama Administration puts the finishing touches on its new post-START strategic arms deal with Russia, . What a coincidence!
Thoughtful coverage of this new post-START limit of 1,550 has deservingly revolved around how modest a reduction it is, since this figure is a mere 150 weapons below the bottom of the 1,700-2,200 range band that President Bush agreed with Russia eight long years ago. Few people, if anyone, seem to think that this reduction is an intrinsically bad idea, however, and Gates’ comment highlights the degree to which these talks, which were begun by the Bush Administration in September 2006, have been concluded on essentially Bush Administration terms – at least with respect to the raw numbers. (Let’s leave verification and missile defense for another day, once it has become clear what this new agreement will actually say in these important regards.) The text of the treaty that will be signed in April hasn’t been released yet, but it seems that.
To be sure, it is a bit discomfiting to have such reductions agreed before the Obama Administration has gotten around to identifying and articulating a U.S. nuclear weapons policy in the first place. The new administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is greatly delayed, and while no one doubts that it will end up saying things consistent with the now-agreed post-START framework – the White House, of course, would not permit its NPR to say otherwise – there is a whiff here of the political and arms-negotiating cart leading the strategic policy horse. Nevertheless, the numbers aren’t shocking, and probably bode well for the new treaty’s eventual Senate ratification.
In effect, , and few commentators are likely to complain too much – even if Obama’s more starry-eyed political allies may now be squirming at how little was actually done in this agreement, and his arms control advisors fretting about how long and difficult a negotiating process this turned out to be. (There now turns out to be nothing particularly “reset” about the U.S.-Russian strategic arms relationship, except in uncomfortable ways. If anything, the parties have “reset” their negotiating dynamics – which is to say, regressed – to an adversarial mid-1980s milieu. The congenially codified reciprocated unilateralism of President Bush’s Moscow Treaty now seems a thing of the distant past.)
To my eye, however, the most interesting thing about the new deployed strategic warhead limit of 1,550 weapons is in the degree to which it so closely follows the cautionary note offered by Secretary Gates during the Bush Administration. (In fact, the agreed number exceeds by 50 weapons the level below which Gates said he would become “nervous.”) The Obama Administration’s post-START agreement, therefore, would seem to be an all but explicit acknowledgment that ongoing Russian and Chinese modernization of their nuclear forces is becoming a brake upon U.S. nuclear disarmament. This needs to be much better understood in the disarmament community than it appears to be today.
Russia and China are both today working to replace or augment ageing silo-based missile systems with advanced mobile missiles; both and are building new classes of ballistic missile submarine with new missiles; and both have reportedly – Russia “apparently” and China “possibly” – been working on new warhead designs in part through the use of secret low-level nuclear explosive testing in violation of their no-testing promises. , while . Moscow has also adopted an increasingly nuclear-weapons-friendly strategic doctrine, and hasn’t been shy about .
If the missions of U.S. nuclear forces include the classic deterrence role of holding at risk the forces of a potential adversary, the shift to more survivable mobile missiles creates new challenges for targeteers, even as potential adversaries’ ongoing modernization work on delivery systems and warhead designs increases the dangers of U.S. technological surprise. This creates pressures to retain larger numbers of warheads and delivery systems than would otherwise be the case, and incentives to resume or continue advanced research and development that might otherwise be felt less necessary. As Gates’ remarks indicates, nuclear weapons proliferation also threatens to increase the problem, by adding yet more potential targets that planners may feel they have to be able to hold at risk in order to provide deterrence. Hence the Secretary’s comment about becoming “nervous” below 1,500 deployed warheads – which should really have surprised no one, and which seems to reflect an underlying reality of strategic policy that transcends U.S. presidential administrations.
One doesn’t hear the disarmament community talking about the braking effect of foreign modernization and nuclear weapons proliferation upon U.S. disarmament, of course, for many of its leading lights still seem to remain ideologically intoxicated by the perverse notion that the United States is the root of all evil in the arms control world. (Russia and China are afterthoughts, when considered at all. These powers will, it is patronizingly and implausibly assumed, follow obligingly when we “lead by example.”) It’s quite clear, however, that U.S. strategists have noticed the challenge. If there is to be any meaningful hope of deep U.S.-Russian arms reductions after this post-START deal – rather than merely another round of showy but smallish cuts designed to permit the Obama Administration to insist that its repeated promises of “further steps” toward disarmament weren’t just opportunistic politically-correct puffery – some answer will have to be found to handling this tension.
One answer to the problem of this braking effect might be somehow to constrain Russian and Chinese nuclear work. To describe Moscow and Beijing as being utterly uninterested in such constraints, however, would be dramatically to understate the problem, and the odds of real progress in this regard seem very low. (Verification of modernization restrictions would also be quite an interesting challenge.)
An alternative approach is to take affirmative U.S. steps to more obviously level the potential future playing field by moving America back into the modernization business, as a means to safeguard against technological surprise and to permit reductions to continue. President Obama pledged in his famous April 2009 speech in Prague that “.´Ï&²Ô²ú²õ±è; His Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Ellen Tauscher, has declared that “.´Ï&²Ô²ú²õ±è; At what point might the conceded need to maintain such nuclear deterrence – especially with ever-smaller numbers of systems and warheads pursuant to the ObamaÂ’s disarmament agenda – require the United States stop being the only weapons possessor on the planet not to be modernizing its forces?
Let’s stop and take stock for a moment, for some readers have challenged me on the claim that the U.S. is alone in not modernizing. As noted, Russia and China are modernizing on multiple axes. . The . India and Pakistan are both thought to be modernizing their delivery systems as rapidly as they can, in addition to – and in India’s case this work includes building a and is said to be . Even Israel, a country long presumed by most observers to possess nuclear weapons but which has famously refused either to confirm or to deny this status, is . North Korea, of course, just conducted its , and is working on .
As for the United States, however, we’ve scrapped thousands of warheads and delivery systems under START and the Moscow Treaty, and made more cuts such as with and to . The United States is building no new ballistic missiles and no new submarines, and while there apparently now do exist plans for some kind of “next generation” bomber, no decision seems to have been made on whether it will actually be “dual-role” (i.e., nuclear capable) at all. Under President Bush, there were efforts to look into the possibility of two “new” nuclear weapons designs – an and a . (Technically speaking, these were less “new” weapons than modifications of older designs, but this subtlety escaped most critics.) This work, however, involved no more than design and feasibility studies, and both programs were in any event amidst a firestorm of criticism. Washington has been for some time, therefore, indeed the sole nuclear “player” actually to be both reducing our forces and refusing to modernize them.
The coincidence between Secretary Gates’ comments about Russian and Chinese modernization and the limit on the number of deployed warheads that will appear in the post-START agreement, however, suggests that this U.S. status may not too long be sustainable. It is perhaps for this reason that the Obama Administration’s latest budget request includes , to study the potential design of a follow-on ballistic missile submarine to , a “ that could involve the incorporation of some new features in order to permit this old weapon to remain reliable, and studies to determine the .
As yet, these budget requests have not been funded, and to study the possibility of something is of course not the same thing as actually deciding to procure it. But the Obama Administration clearly is laying the groundwork for a U.S. return to the modernization business. There are also rumors of anxious efforts within the Administration to figure out how much can be added to a nuclear weapon design without having to call it a “new” device: there is clearly interest in squeezing as much as they can get away with, politically speaking, under the rubric of “life extension” modifications. Perhaps tellingly, .´Ï&²Ô²ú²õ±è; This isnÂ’t necessarily the same thing as acquiring no new weapons, and in fact sounds much like .´Ï&²Ô²ú²õ±è;
If Obama does follow the lead of all the other nuclear weapons possessors and return America to an agenda of at least limited nuclear force modernization, this step should not necessarily be regarded as a victory for the hawks or a defeat for the doves. A solid case can be made – and – that ensuring the reliability and future viability of U.S. warheads and delivery systems is an essential prerequisite to any serious disarmament agenda. Obama seems to remain committed to disarmament, but he has stated quite plainly that we should not hold our breath for abolition. “.´Ï&²Ô²ú²õ±è; On the long road to this destination, he expects an ever-smaller U.S. arsenal to remain adequate to handling whatever nuclear missions are felt to remain.
Even within the ambit of Obama’s disarmament vision, therefore, if a stable and reliable “zero” proves unfeasible before U.S. forces encounter block-obsolescence problems with existing delivery systems or unforeseen technical glitches with our Cold War-era warhead designs – and here one should remember that our , and the , both dates within Barack Obama’s likely lifetime – we’ll need something new to bridge the gap. Since such steps unfortunately require painfully long lead times, it stands to reason that both hawks and sensible doves should be willing to embrace some nuclear force modernization: the former will presumably feel such moves to be better than the current status quo (i.e., no modernization at all), while the latter should recognize that deep U.S. reductions depend upon maintaining a credible arsenal as numbers shrink.
Such a shift in posture would not be easy for the Obama Administration to sell to its political supporters on the left, at home and abroad, but it may prove necessary all the same – both for the preservation of U.S. national security interests and for the political and substantive survival of the president’s disarmament policy as a viable and intellectually credible agenda.
Note:
The original posting of this essay replicated a mistake in the , which declared incorrectly that “The number of nuclear-armed missiles and heavy bombers would be capped at 700 each.´Ï&²Ô²ú²õ±è; In fact, according to the White HouseÂ’s own fact sheet on the new treaty, the agreement features separate limits on total versus deployed delivery systems as follows: “.´Ï&²Ô²ú²õ±è; Readers should take note that the limit on bombers, alone, is emphatically not to be 700! (That would, it has been pointed out to me, be an awful lot of bombers ....) Thanks to an attentive reader for drawing my attention to the error.