Strategic Posture Commission and the CTBT

The Strategic Posture Commission failed to reach a consensus view on CTBT ratification. Bummer.

Time will tell what impact, if any, this has on the looming CTBT debate in Congress. VP Joe Biden, who has been tasked with shepherding the CTBT through Congress, will surely take notice of this. As for the "lead but hedge" approach the Commission embraced in principle as the U.S. strategy on balancing disarmament and deterrence goals, it is probably fair to interpret this as a significant qualification of the "lead" imperative.

Unsurprisingly, commission members disagreed on whether or not the stockpile could be maintained reliably without testing and also on the verifiability of the treaty. There is no need to revisit the entire CTBT debate here, so let's arbitrarily pick one point. One interesting thing was that CTBT opponents didn't hesitate to go on-record with their suspicions about Russia and China nuclear weapons testing.

Apparently Russia and possibly China are conducting low yield tests. This is quite serious because Russian and Chinese doctrine highlights tactical nuclear warfighting. With no agreed definition, U.S. relative understanding of these capabilities would fall further behind over time and undermine our capability to deter tactical threats against allies [emphasis added].

Russia has already ratified the CTBT and has repeatedly denied that it was conducting tests that crossed the zero yield threshold; so this is a fairly provocative accusation, even if couched in a specific discussion about the lack of consensus on the terms.

Experts have been divided on this issue of Russian testing for a long time. The main site in question is the remote weapons test facility at Novaya Zemlya. Ambassador Wolfgang Hoffmann, executive secretary of the CTBTO Preparatory Commission, visited there in 2003 and found that Russia "had nothing going on in breach of the treaty." But this doesn't resolve the problem of definitional ambiguity with respect to what constitutes a breach.

So let's assume, purely for the sake of argument, that Russia occasionally lets a few neutrons get too rambunctious and some tests on tactical nukes have therefore produced a small yield. On one hand, yes, it seems dumb to ratify a treaty that is being violated - at least in spirit - according to our understanding of it. And arms control for the sake of arms control is unhelpful at best, and damaging to the practice at worst.

On the other hand, Russia has already demonstrated that it will develop tactical nukes with or without CTBT ratification by the U.S. So this is only relevant to the CTBT debate in this country if what is being argued is that the U.S. needs to resume testing in order to understand these weapons and thus to deter them. Leaving aside the debate about exactly how much you need to know about a weapon to deter its use, the argument made by CTBT opponents here belies the fact that the U.S. has arrived at an unparalleled understanding of how nuclear weapons work precisely because we stopped testing, which changed the question at the labs from "does it work?" to "how does it work?".

It's true that there are some things you just can't know without a yield-producing test. But the question is what exactly Russia or China could get from such minimal yield tests that we can't figure out without conducting something similar ourselves. And it seems as though any potential information gap between (a) what we learn about Russian tests (e.g. that there was in fact a small yield, of this type, etc.), and (b) what we would need to find out by doing a similar test (low yield included), would be pretty narrow. These are questions for scientists. The strategic significance of the answers is  a matter for consideration by the President and the Congress.

The Commission, though unable to come to a consensus on this issue, provided a service in showing just how hard the CTBT fight could be. It offered numerous recommendations for how to approach the issue. First among them was to "frame a broad national and international debate about the CTBT." Shameless PONI plug: check.

LIVE DEBATE ON THE CTBT

DARYL KIMBALL VS. STEPHEN RADEMAKER

MAY 13 (5:30 - 7:30PM)

CSIS B1 CONFERENCE CENTER

RSVP to cjones@csis.org