Yesterday, Carnegie published a worthwhile read dissecting the op-ed written last week by Senator Kyl and Richard Perle. They rightly call out some of the arguments made by Kyl and Perle but also make a few statements that could use some investigation. Strong arguments from the Carnegie piece include:
-Most nonproliferation folks do not think that U.S. disarmament efforts will change the calculus of states like Iran and North Korea to get nuclear weapons. It could help with efforts to shore up cooperation (of which the likelihood of success, both in garnering support and that support providing results, certainly can be questioned).
-CTBT verification. It can’t simply be dismissed as unverifiable, even if that turns out to be true. There have been dramatic technological advances in the past decade which is why the Strategic Posture Commission was able to reach a consensus on the claim that
[T]he Obama administration should help to frame a broad national and international debate about the CTBT by conducting a broad net assessment of the benefits, costs, and risks of ratification and entry into force of the CTBT.
That said, the approaching ad hom anecdote about Richard Perle probably doesn’t add much to the debate.
Issues Carnegie was light on:
-Infrastructure– The Kyl and Pearl op-ed spends a good chunk of space (6 paragraphs depending on your counting measures) discussing the massive nuclear infrastructure problem in the United States. They extensively quote the consensus of the Strategic Posture Commission (which had an infrastructure working group chaired by PONI fan favorite Linton Brooks- full list of infrastructure working group participants on page 159) regarding the serious decline, both physical and intellectual, of our nuclear weapons complex. It was also interesting to note the Commission specifically referenced Libby Turpen’s (co-chaired by Frances Townsend and Donald Kerrick) excellent report on the degree of decay in our nuclear weapons complex. Carnegie’s primary response to this is that:
there is room for disagreement about whether an urgent modernization program is required. Science-based “stockpile stewardship” has been effective to date at ensuring the viability of existing US nuclear weapons. What is needed is an unhurried and sober analysis of exactly what is required to ensure that the US nuclear arsenal remains safe and reliable—exactly what the Obama administration is doing.
This assumes an arbitrary binary between stockpile stewardshipesque efforts and the dirty M word programs that connote images of RNEP and will, in theory, reverse the perception of the U.S. taking good faith efforts to move towards disarmament. In reality, there a variety of ways to approach modernization in what has come to be known as the “spectrum of options.” The Strategic Posture Commission’s call for a “case-by-case” basis makes a lot of intuitive sense based on the massive constraints the complex is facing combined with the harsh budget environment based on the economic collapse. While the Obama administration is looking at its modernization options moving forward, Kyl and Perle do have a strong point that the administration will need to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to maintaing a “safe, secure, and effective” deterrent, something they are understandably jittery about given the official zeroing out of the RRW budget this year.
-Reverse prolifology- In the same respect that nonproliferation advocates are not arguing that credibility would deter states like Iran and North Korea from going nuclear, Carnegie’s claim that
the United States’ huge nuclear arsenal failed to deter North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs and has done nothing to help it resolve these crises.
also sort of misses the boat. North Korea and Iran are countries that have a number of unique characteristics that make them less than ideal test cases for analyzing proliferation dynamics. It is probably more the case that Kyl and Perle are worried about the prospect that “our allies will see the danger and our adversaries the opportunity” (admittedly a quote in the context of unilateral disarmament which is also not what most nonproliferation folks advocate). The fact that Iran and North Korea are in the nuclear ballpark is somewhat irrelevant to the question of whether Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc. decide to make a play for a bomb, whether because our deterrent was not credible or because we didn’t have the international support to convince them against it.