Balancing my infatuation with the Jonas Brothers and with men who "can't remember what they had for breakfast" (which is it, dude?) is keeping this "kid" quite busy so please pardon the absence of kitschy metaphors, ad-hominem attacks at young people, and repetitive unsubstantiated assertions.

The Strategic Posture Commission Report Does Represent a Consensus

The Strategic Posture Commission Report represents a consensus created from 12 radically disparate ideological starting points. Of course, this does not represent a consensus across America. But it proves that forging one is possible. That "there is no bipartisan consensus today on nuclear weapons" is an argument in favor of endorsing the commission as a focal point for generating one (this remains true even if you say it four times in the same blog entry). Not sure I care to actually respond to this suggestion that we give up on democracy and cede all nuclear-related decision-making to guy that "gets paid the big money" (like the amount of money that George Bush got paid?). I will, however, remind our audience that both the Nuclear Posture Review and the Strategic Posture Commission were mandated by and are submitted to Congress. As "anyone who's run one would know," this means they inform the collective decision-making of some 535 elected officials who, as Jeffrey Lewis' father likes to say, "get paid the big money." In America, no man gets paid enough to ratify a treaty or to pass an appropriations bill.

The "Details" (And Why do Leftist Ideologues Always Reduce Everything to Deterrence?)

The "details" identified by the Commission in support of a new weapons design program include:

• Unilateral and Bilateral Arms Reductions. "[H]igh confidence in the reliability of the stockpile could allow us to consider giving up thousands of weapons we keep in reserve. And for the same reason, it could allow us to enter into negotiations with Russia to make further reductions in the number of deployed nuclear weapons, reserve weapons, and nuclear delivery systems."

• Minimizing the risk of a resumption of nuclear testing. "The risks of a return to nuclear testing to support the refurbishment and modernization program.... could be made lower than in a program of refurbishment that permits only life extension."
• U.S. Scientific Leadership. For 60 years the nuclear weapons program has been the conduit for drawing the best and brightest scientists to the national laboratories and for sustaining the basic research activities that provide the programmatic innovation. At the risk of obscuring the "real" issue, its worth noting two sub-"details:"
  • A healthy infrastructure is a pre-requisite to arms reductions (as total inventory levels go down, the hedge passes from stockpile to infrastructure):"[T]he smaller the stockpile becomes, the more important it will be to sustain the labs' scientific expertise
  • The capabilities required to reduce nuclear dangers globally are leveraged off of the core scientific strength of the weapons program. "Their unique expertise and experimental and computational tools enable work on many other high national priorities [detail alert!], including nonproliferation, nuclear threat reduction, nuclear forensics, countering bioterrorism, ballistic missile defense, countering improvised explosive devices, nuclear energy and alternative energy sources, and assistance to the intelligence community with advanced technology and analysis of foreign programs."
• Lifting the design constraints that prevent the application of enhanced safety and security features.
• Deterrence *in the long run.* The man getting paid the big money thinks we'll need an arsenal well beyond his lifetime. And not even Joey C. trusts LEP for that long.
• Assurance in the Long-Run. Does anyone in Turkey know what a performance margin is? Unlikely. Will its senior leadership key into long-term challenges facing its security provider when making long-term investment decisions concerning its existential security? Almost certainly.

So, ArmsControlWonk, exactly which of those details "don't matter?" See. The difference between the commission's report and every other ideologically-driven op-ed masquerading as a "study" is that it didn't only address the components of the debate that conveniently align with one ideological "option." It couldn't. The Commission did not have the luxury of ignoring or mocking dissent. Oppressed by the terrible burden of relevance, they had to listen to each other. xoxoxo, Jessica Yeats