Selling the counterintuitive: Funding nukes to eliminate them

By Chris Jones

For some time now, those concerned about the Obama administration’s lack of effort on the “safe, secure, and effective” part of the Prague agenda felt that the FY 11 Budget Request was a key opportunity for the administration to put its money where its mouth is. In some respects, the FY11 budget does just that. As the AP reported, the FY11 budget provides an additional $624 million for weapons activities within the NNSA budget (in addition to large plus-ups to counterproliferation). This is largely consistent with what President Biden laid out in his recent op-ed and what the Four Statesman said was a necessary part of the effort to move toward a world without nuclear weapons. Not surprisingly, some lambasted the decision to put more money in “weapons activities” for nuclear weapons. For example, the AP article states:

Greg Mello, director of the nuclear watchdog Los Alamos Study Group, said budgets for NNSA and DOE have increased in recent years, but the nation ''hasn't seen any increase in weapons activities like this since the early years of Ronald Reagan.'' He called the budget ''a complete surrender to Senate Republicans,'' who have argued that stockpile reductions must be accompanied by a modernized nuclear weapons complex.

From an even more sensationalist view, Carol Driver’s piece in the Daily Mail is titled “Nobel Peace Prize-winner Barack Obama ups spending on nuclear weapons to even more than George Bush.” Driver argues:

President Obama is planning to increase spending on America's nuclear weapons stockpile just days after pledging to try to rid the world of them. In his budget to be announced on Monday, Mr Obama has allocated £4.3billion to maintain the U.S. arsenal - £370million more than George Bush spent on nuclear weapons in his final year. The Obama administration also plans to spend a further £3.1billion over the next five years on nuclear security. The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to U.S. people during in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. And it flies in the face of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’.

This type of press coverage only makes the Obama administration’s complex nuclear PR effort even more difficult. Budget plusups on the weapons side of things at NNSA and the labs have both substantive and political motives. Substantively, there has been an increasing consensus over the past few years highlighted by the Strategic Posture Commission, Vice President Biden, and the Four Statesmen that something serious needs to be done about the weapons complex. Jeffrey Lewis has it right when he says:

I suspect that lack of funding isn’t the primary challenge facing the labs nor is more money a sufficient remedy for their woes. But more money is probably a necessary element of a comprehensive strategy to fix the labs. This is, all things considered, probably the correct policy decision.

Viewed from the United States, there are a number of reasons investments in the nuclear infrastructure can benefit national security. Most notably, they help sustain our nuclear deterrent. Viewed from countries in the international community who are not privy to the U.S. extended deterrent, the reasons for such a policy move are tougher to explain. They are a big win for the “safe, secure, and effective” part of the Prague speech but seemingly much less so on the vision of zero. This does not have to be the case. In the same way that Joe Cirincione argues that disarmament and nonproliferation are two sides of the same coin, the challenge for the administration is to convince non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS) that U.S. efforts to maintain a safe, security and effective arsenal and move toward a world without nuclear weapons are two sides of the same coin.

In the words of the POTUS, “let me be clear” that this will be a very tough task. For some, the basic premise that the U.S. needs to fund nuclear weapons so that it can rid of them will be a non-starter. These investments simply serve as more evidence that nuclear weapons continue to retain their gamechanger status and that the U.S. has no intention of leaving the business anytime soon. Convincing those who hold, or claim to hold, this viewpoint may prove to be a Sisyphean task not worth its weight.

For others, there may be some room to “thread the needle” and explain that a “safe, secure, and effective” arsenal and a vision of zero are actually complementary objectives as opposed to irreconcilable goals. With respect to the FY11 Budget Request, there are (at least) 3 arguments that need to be emphasized and explained in a politically savvy manner:

1. Arsenal confidence provides the leverage to undertake objectives consistent with the Prague agenda. Technically speaking, very high levels of confidence in the arsenal provide the ability the U.S. the ability to reduce how large the hedge has to be. Secretary Gates, among others, has consistently made this argument. This argument should be able to resonate with NNWS assuming they are convinced that constraints such as no testing and no new military capabilities are sufficient to reduce skepticism about the need to tinker with warheads. Politically, it is the main card the Democrats have to play in the effort to get new START and/or CTBT. In some respects, this could be an even more important issue because the CTBT in particular has become such a lightning rod for U.S. nonproliferation commitments. That said, this argument needs be explained as “arsenal confidence allows us to permanently forswear our need to test” with minimal reference to domestic U.S. politics. The inability of the U.S. Congress to get things done is increasingly well documented abroad and probably not a great way to explain why the U.S. needs to make these investments, even if it is true.

2. Spillover benefits from nuclear weapons science--- Working on nuclear weapons is the hub to the spokes of related sciences like verification and counterproliferation. Ensuring the nuclear infrastructure and work on nuclear weapons (within above cited constraints) is critical to develop scientific solutions to problems like verifying warheads, including at the tactical level. The Gang of 4 argued in their recent op-ed:

This scientific capability is equally important to the long-term goal of achieving and maintaining a world free of nuclear weapons—with all the attendant expertise on verification, detection, prevention and enforcement that is required.

The causality between work on nuclear weapons and related science is a largely a one way street and therefore it is worthwhile to highlight the advances that are made in these “cousin sciences” as a return on the investments made in nuclear weapons.

3. Last but not least, extended deterrence. The debate about extended deterrence is back in the United States but has become one of many nuclear issues that suffers from a divide where people have decided nukes matter a great deal or hardly at all. Internationally, it is another manifestation of the haves and the haves nots: those under the umbrella and those not. For the former, it has been clear for some time the NPR is going to emphasize the importance of extended deterrence which is an important nonproliferation tool. Convincing countries like Japan and Turkey about the credibility and capability of our extended deterrent is important but another wrinkle in the equation is the view from the NNWS that don’t fall under the U.S. umbrella. It may fall on deaf ears but the U.S. should work to explain to key decision-makers in countries like Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and Egypt the role that the U.S. nuclear arsenal can play in preventing key countries, which may be in their neighborhood, from going nuclear. That is not to say the U.S. has to forego key reductions and other steps toward Article VI. Rather, it is to say that the U.S needs to explain how actions to maintain a "safe, secure, and effective" arsenal can play a stabilizing role from the view of countries from which the U.S. seeks nonproliferation.  The task may be gargantuan but will be increasingly more important as the U.S tries to tackle a complex set of nonproliferation objectives.

If “safe, secure, and effective,” then vision of a world without nuclear weapons. Convincing people at home at abroad that these concepts are linked and actually complementary in some respects will be the challenge.