Arms Control Wonk

Sorry about the light posting as of late — the day job has been busier than usual and the new column at Foreign Policy is definitely a lot of work.

I’ve started a few posts, but got hung up in the usual ways — the problems turned out to be more interesting than I thought or documents harder to obtain.  I am hoping some of these efforts will bear fruit at some point.

In the meantime, I have a long piece up at Foreign Policy looking at the recent history of US National Intelligence Estimates on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions, titled The Ayatollah’s Pregnant Pause.  I didn’t write the title, but I wish I did.

As I said, it is long.  Despite clocking in around 3,000 words, there were bits and pieces that needed to be trimmed.  Some of them I still want to share.

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For four years now, STRATCOM has hosted an annual deterrence symposium that provides opportunities for younger officers and their seniors to hear old hands, U.S. government officials, foreign perspectives, policy influentials, and the occasional heretic. As a networking and learning experience on all matters relating to deterrence, it doesn’t get much better than this.

I was on a panel this year with Frank Miller and George Perkovich addressing the question of whether nuclear weapons are becoming more or less influential in the emerging international security environment. Peter Lavoy, the Pentagon’s Principal Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia and the Pacific, served as moderator. Videos of the panel discussions and speakers will be posted on STRATCOM’s event web site. [Update: videos have been posted here.] A common answer to hard questions throughout the two-day event, held on August 8-9, was “it depends.” My presentation follows.

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Back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we used telephones with long cords and wrote personal letters. This dinosaur still abstains from Facebook, rarely texts, and doesn’t tweet. The transition from writing on a yellow legal pad to a six-lines-of-text training computer in the 1980s was a harrowing experience. My cell phone prompts derision, and my PC is old school.

Given this checkered and challenged relationship with modern technology, I am probably not the best person to offer aspiring wonks career counseling on how to improve communication skills. But here goes…

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What are we to make of these two statements, one by Senator Jon Kyl and the other by Representative Michael Turner?

A central tenet of the Obama Administration’s security policy is that, if the U.S. ‘leads by example’ we can ‘reassert our moral leadership’ and influence other nations to do things. It is the way the President intends to advance his goal of working toward a world free of nuclear weapons and to deal with the stated twin top priorities of the Administration: nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

A central tenet of the Obama Administration’s security policy is that, if the U.S. “leads by example” we can “reassert our moral leadership” and influence other nations to do things relevant to our nonproliferation goals.   It is the way the President intends to advance his goal of working toward a world free of nuclear weapons and to deal with the stated twin top priorities of the Administration: nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

No, I didn’t make a mistake. The statements are identical, save for the clause “relevant to our nonproliferation goals.”  Representative Turner plagiarized a passage from one of Senator Kyl’s speeches. Didn’t Joe Biden get in trouble for this?

Anyway, the plagiarism doesn’t really bother me.  We all know that members of Congress don’t write their own speeches. At least one of Senator Kyl’s staffers moved over to Representative Turner’s office, which may explain why Turner is now recycling Kyl’s old speeches.

What really bothers me is the use of punctuation — in English, inverted commas, also called quotation marks, are used for quotations. You know this, right?

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Sorry about the light posting last week, but I had a bit of an adventure.  Let me tell you about it.

One of my favorite articles of all time was published in 1993 in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  Called “Sleuthing From Home,” Vipin Gupta and Phillip McNab detailed their  effort at VERTIC to use commercial satellite imagery and seismic networks to detect, characterize and announce a Chinese nuclear test before the Chinese government did. Today, it would be quite a bit of work.  Twenty-years ago?  It was career-altering.

Over the past week I had my own “sleuthing from home” experience.  NNSA beat me and two colleagues to the punch, but just barely.

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If you liked the 2005 U.S.-India civil nuclear agreement, you’ll love providing U.S. technology or hardware to India for ballistic missile defenses.

The deal between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, affirmed by the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Indian Parliament in 2008, was characterized as a boon for U.S.-India relations and a grave threat to Pakistan’s national security. It was widely heralded by U.S. advocates as opening the Indian market to American-designed power plants, combat aircraft, retail goods, and insurance companies. The deal was also supposed to usher in a new era of strategic cooperation, as Washington assisted New Delhi to become a counterweight to China. In Pakistan, the deal was seen as the harbinger of a steep build-up in Indian nuclear forces.

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A few people in Washington are pumping up the forthcoming renewal of the U.S. bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement with Taiwan as an impending shot in the arm for the no-enrichment/no-reprocessing “gold standard” they want to see implemented by the U.S. in all future 123 agreements following the conclusion of the U.S.-UAE agreement in 2009.

Nowhere in the world does the U.S. government have as much leverage over a foreign country’s  nuclear activities as it does in Taiwan. Taiwan therefore does not serve as a model for global application of the “gold standard,” regardless of what some pundits had to say in this piece that Elaine Grossman published a couple of days ago. I saw the article just after returning to Europe from Chicago yesterday. (By coincidence, it would appear that Elaine reported it out while I was grocery-shopping and dining here in Elaine’s hometown of Cleveland last week.)

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Mike Moore reminded me a while back of this verse from William Butler Yeats’ classic poem, “The Second Coming“:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Mike was thinking of domestic U.S. politics, but Yeats’ lines, penned after the carnage of World War I, still have global reach. The Soviet Union, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria have all imploded with weapons of mass destruction. Company men in the Kremlin and strongmen in the Arab world have had their appointments, as Yeats wrote, with the “rough beast, its hour come round at last.” They were swept away amidst anarchy and the blood-dimmed tide, their padded stockpiles of WMD of no practical use. Still standing: Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, plagued with internal rot. Too big to fail? Works for banks and for Wall Street, but not for poorly governed states with WMD.

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The Commander of the US Strategic Command, C. Robert “Bob” Kehler recently offered support for the Triad — the trinity of bombers, land-based missiless and ballistic missile submarines — that some people have chose to characterize as tepid.

Now, admittedly by “some people” I mean two interns at the Heritage Foundation, one of whom now writes for Air Force Magazine.

Nukes of Hazard has posted Kehler’s remarks on the triad. As I suspected,  they are essentially the same as the ones he made in October 2011 and May 2012. To most observers, Kehler has continuously expressed support for the triad, not opposition.  Kehler’s heresy was to note that his support for the triad is contingent and immediate, subject to adjustment in light of changes to the strategic environment.   (Some people take insufficient enthusiasm very seriously.  It’s a good thing Kehler doesn’t command the KPA Strategic Rocket Forces because he’s got a thing or two to learn about sugar-coating things for 20-somethings.)

Rather than heresy, Kehler’s defense of the triad.  has been, in fact, quite orthodox.  He actually made the canonical case for the ICBM-leg of the triad, based on promptness:

And what the ICBM force gives to the president is the ability to respond promptly. I think that’s still a valuable component of the range of alternatives that we could offer to the president.”

This has always been the fundamental justification for keeping some portion of the ballistic missile force based on land.

The statement left me wondering: Are ICBMs really more responsive than SLBMs?

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I have a new post up over at 38 North looking at the role of the Panel of Experts supporting the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1718 (2006) — the resolution establishing sanctions on the DPRK.

I had originally intended to list the panel members in a box accompanying the article, but it didn’t work out.  Here is the current roster:

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