Just like arms races, blogs sometimes come to an end when the resources needed to keep them alive and well are needed elsewhere. So it is that the Prague Project website will permanently close up shop in the coming weeks. We hope you enjoyed the blog over the last few years.
We leave you with the soothing vocals of Vera Lynn.
Most comic book movies end with the superheroes saving the world from imminent destruction. To add realism, X-Men: First Class takes place at the closet the world has come to actually being destroyed – the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The movie is great on its own. But its historical setting raises some under-appreciated points about the actual Cuban Missile Crisis. Joe Cirincione and I wrote a blog at Huffington highlighting the film’s nuclear angle: The X-Men Didn’t Save Us.
In the blog, we write about a terrifying episode form the actual crisis that was unknown to me until just this week:
Vasili Arkhipov: The Man Who Saved the World
There really was a submarine escorting the missile-carrying cargo ships to Cuba. But it was a Soviet sub, not a mutant one. On October 27, US destroyers dropped depth charges on the Soviet submarine, B-59 — unaware that the sub carried a nuclear-tipped torpedo.
Cut off from communications with Moscow and with charges exploding overhead, the exhausted Soviet captain ordered the torpedo readied for launch. “We’re going to blast them now!” he said, “We will die, but we will sink them all.” But firing the torpedo required the 3 top officers to all agree. They voted. It went 2-1with Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov voting against. The order was never given, the sub surfaced and nuclear war was averted.
As this story has been told since 2002, it turns out the world owes a debt of great gratitude to Vasili Arkhipov – in addition to the usual cast of Kennedys and advisors – for averting nuclear war on the world’s most dangerous day.
That’s my lasting takeaway from writing the blog. My lasting takeaway from the movie: Kevin Bacon can afford some really fancy naval reactors.
You can learn more about the Cuban Missile Crisis at GW’s archives.
The United States spends roughly $54 billion a year on nuclear weapons and related programs, with plans in place to spend roughly $10 billion more per year on new nuclear submarines, missiles, and bombers. If plans go through, it could overshadow U.S. efforts to reap the security benefits of reducing the role and number of nuclear weapons in its military strategy.
The Tucson Graveyard for Retired B-52s
The U.S. needs to bring its nuclear budgets and guidance in line with its efforts to reduce its nuclear arsenal. Daryl Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, makes this potent argument in his editorial “Trimming Nuclear Excess” in this month’s issue of Arms Control Today. He writes:
Maintaining and modernizing U.S. strategic forces at current, higher levels is not only unnecessary, but prohibitively expensive. If Congress and the White House are serious about reducing defense expenditures by $400 billion by 2023 to reduce the ballooning federal deficit, they should start by deferring or curtailing the Pentagon’s ambitious plan to upgrade and replace the strategic triad, which is projected to exceed $100 billion over the same period.
Current plans to replace the strategic triad of nuclear submarines, missiles, and bombers are designed to preserve the status quo – with 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear weapons once New START is implemented – through the second half of this century. We do not need that many weapons to preserve our security today, let alone in 2080. Nor can we afford that many.
The U.S. Needs to Get Control of its Nuclear Budget
As Kimball suggests, the process begins with the Obama administration’s update of the decade-old presidential guidance on nuclear force structure and employment policy. By eliminating Cold War requirements from this guidance, like the ability to launch nuclear weapons on a moment’s notice, President Obama can reorient the Pentagon toward maintaining a smaller nuclear arsenal.
This will eliminate the antiquated justifications for keeping thousands of nuclear weapons, put the U.S. on track for deep nuclear reductions, and, in the end, save perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars.
None of this will be easy. Nuclear weapons constituents in Congress and the Pentagon will attempt to defend their inflated nuclear budgets to the last dime – no matter how divorced these budgets are from strategic and fiscal realities. Given the climate in Washington, these nuclear constituents will struggle to uphold their hypocrisy of demanding budget cuts while buying weapons we do not need at costs we cannot afford.
That is why the upper hand goes to sensible policy-makers who put the U.S. on course to achieve nuclear reductions, save cash, and improve its national security.
U.S. nuclear posture is based on the assumption that placing thousands of nuclear missiles on hair-trigger alert deters our adversaries from taking unacceptable military action. But we should question the logic that more is always better. Much like Lisa Simpson in this classic Season 7 episode about Springfield’s ‘War on Bears,’ we often speciously conclude that large stockpiles of nuclear weapons inherently add to the credibility of deterrence. They don’t. Deterrence with lower numbers of nuclear weapons can be just as stable as with massive numbers.
James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment concludes in his new Adelphi paper, “Deterrence During Disarmament: Deep Nuclear Reductions and International Security,” a world with low numbers of nuclear weapons (around 500 in the US, for example) can be just as safe and stable as our current world.
Not everyone agrees. The issue came up for discussion in a recent Senate Armed Services Sub-Committee on Strategic Forces hearing, where some Republican senators bemoaned the administration’s efforts to pursue further bilateral reductions of nuclear arms with Russia. Despite being reminded that every president since Harry Truman, with the exception of George W. Bush, has supported the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, these senators refuse to accept that updating U.S. nuclear policy for the post-Cold War era has any security benefits for the United States.
On the contrary, the U.S. stands to gain real security benefits from negotiating the multilateral reduction of global nuclear arsenals. Deterrence can fail. Accepting the nuclear status quo does nothing to mitigate that serious threat. By decreasing global nuclear arsenals in a responsible manner we can reduce the global risk that nuclear weapons again get used.
One way to begin this process in the United States is to direct the pentagon to realign our strategic posture around a zero-based targeting study. As Acton claims in his study, planning for obliterating the entire Russian command and control structure is unnecessary for deterrence and mostly leads to excess weapons and riskier alert postures. Instead, the U.S. can reduce the number of targets (and hence weapons) to the minimally sufficient number for Russia and China to be deterred. Acton uses the number 500 in his study, arguing that having more does not increase the credibility of the U.S. deterrent. I believe that Russia and China could be adequately deterred with less than 500 warheads – or perhaps just a small rock.
For future analysis, the important question will be “how low can we go without eroding stable deterrence?” I believe this number could take us well below 500 nuclear weapons. U.S. policy-makers need to address this question in order to nudge the defense establishment out of Cold War habits. Perhaps then we can stop acting like the Homer Simpson’s of the world and avoid paying for expensive weapons that do not add to our national security.
Homer Simpson’s Logic
U.S. nuclear posture is based on the assumption that placing thousands of nuclear missiles on hair-trigger alert deters our adversaries from taking unacceptable military action. But we should question the logic that more is always better. Much like Lisa Simpson in this classic Season 7 episode about Springfield’s ‘War on Bears,’ we often speciously conclude that large stockpiles of nuclear weapons inherently add to the credibility of a deterrent. If there are benefits to reducing global nuclear arsenals, and lower numbers of nuclear weapons are just as stabilizing as massive numbers, should we not consider negotiated reductions?
James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment concludes in his new Adelphi paper, “Deterrence During Disarmament: Deep Nuclear Reductions and International Security,” a world with low numbers of nuclear weapons (around 500 in the US, for example) can be just as safe and stable as our current world.
This issue also came up for discussion in a recent Senate Armed Services Sub-Committee on Strategic Forces hearing, where some Republican senators bemoaned the administration’s efforts to pursue further bilateral reductions of nuclear arms with Russia. Despite being reminded that every president since Harry Truman, with the exception of George W. Bush, has supported the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons, these senators refuse to accept that updating U.S. nuclear policy for the post-Cold War era has any security benefits for the United States.
On the contrary, the U.S. could gain some real security benefits from negotiating the multilateral reduction of global nuclear arnseals. For example, smaller forces leave less fissile materials around for terrorist networks or illicit networks to buy, build, or steal. One way to begin this process in the United States is to direct the pentagon to realign our strategic posture around a zero-based targeting study. As Acton claims in his study, it is unnecessary nowadays to think about obliterating the entire Russian command and control structure. Instead, deterrence of the future should be based on identifying high-value Russian and Chinese targets, until multilateral agreements are negotiated (Note: North Korean or Iranian arsenals can be deterred with far fewer weapons). I believe that Russia and China could be adequately deterred with even fewer than 500 warheads.
Overall, Acton’s work, which is concerned with maintaining international stability during the disarmament process, importantly concludes that having more than 500 nuclear weapons does not increase the credibility of U.S. deterrence.
When it comes to the practical steps for gradual and multilateral reductions, however, Acton is rather pessimistic. He fears that political realities and individual state security concerns may trump disarmament momentum in the near-term. Other experts are more optimistic. For example, the Sustainable Partnership with Russia group, a collection of US and Russian defense experts, recently released a report with recommendations for accelerated and deeper bilateral nuclear reductions. They argue that this process can be made easier by capitalizing on the momentum of the ratification of the New START Treaty.
For future analysis, the important question will be “how low can we go without eroding stable deterrence?” I believe this number could take us well below 500 nuclear weapons. More importantly, we should encourage the Pentagon to grapple with this question in order to lift the defense establishment out of a Cold War mindset. Perhaps then we can stop acting like the Homer Simpson’s of the world and avoid paying for expensive weapons that do not add to our national security.
Last year, the day after President Obama and President Medvedev signed New START, Ploughshares Fund and the Center for Policy Studies in Russia (PIR Center) founded a group of American and Russian security and defense experts called the Sustainable Partnership with Russia Group, or the SuPR Group. This morning the SuPR Group released a report with recommendations to further reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles and to strengthen bilateral cooperation as both countries look to counter some of the greatest threats to national and international security, including nuclear proliferation and nuclear security.
The Old Super Group
Before being released to the general public the SuPR Group’s report was circulated to high level U.S. officials in the White House, State Department, Department of Defense and Congress and Top Russian officials, including Russian President Medvedev, were briefed on the Group’s conclusions.
The report was developed following a two-day discussion held last February in Gstaad, Switzerland, by the members of the Group and a handful of official observers; it cautions that failure to nurture the success of the New START could lead to a “cold pause” in U.S.-Russian relations and undermine the security of both nations. The SuPR Group has identified 7 immediate next steps for U.S. and Russian policy-makers to act on in order to avoid such a strategic misstep. Their recommendations are as follows:
Since President Obama took office much has been made of the “reset” in the U.S. relationship with Russia and the ratification of New START has often been heralded the key component of the that “reset”. However, as these seasoned defense experts have urged, U.S. and Russian national security are best served by accelerating the reductions called for in New START and working to create new avenues for cooperation. As Joe Crincione, President of Ploughshares Fund and a member of the SUPR Group, and Haleh Hatami discussed in their recent op-ed, “The New START reactivated the weapons inspection regime between the two countries and put them back on the road to reducing the two largest nuclear stockpiles in the world. But since then, momentum has slowed.”
The goal for both countries policy-makers should be to move as quickly as possible to eclipse the achievements of New START, not settle for them. Indeed, it should be noted that the SuPR Group’s recommendations were similar to those recently discussed by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in The New York Times. It goes without saying that the active pursuit of these recommendations would greatly bolster U.S. and Russian national security.
The SuPR Group is slated to reconvene in Washington D.C. before the end of the year (2011) to continue there ongoing discussion and adjust their recommendations for U.S. and Russian security cooperation.
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