We leave you with the soothing vocals of Vera Lynn.

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 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.

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:

1. Accelerate reductions mandated by New START to ensure completion prior to the next NPT Review Conference
2. Establish greater transparency with regard to U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons, including disclosures of the number of weapons dismantled each year
3. Take measures to “de-alert” nuclear weapons
4. Make progress on NATO-Russia missile defense cooperation and the Conventional Forces in Europe regime
5. Re-energize and elevate bilateral consultations on the Iranian nuclear and missile programs, working toward a common understanding of the risks and a list of options
6. Take an active role in facilitating the success of the 2012 Conference on establishing a WMD-free zone in the Middle East
7. Widen participation of Middle Eastern states in international nonproliferation discussion fora such as the Nuclear Security Summit

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.

On May 1, 2011 an elite Navy SEAL team overseen by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted a raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden.  A decade-long manhunt was concluded by integration of intelligence analysts and special forces units.  Since 9/11, JSOC has tripled in size and has developed a close relationship with American intelligence gatherers and analysts.

This is how the U.S. effectively uses force in the 21st century.  Not ground troops or regime change, just investment in intelligence gathering and Special Forces.  JSOC commands units that disrupt terrorist networks and make it harder for rogue actors to buy, build, or steal weapons of mass destruction.

It is also important to recall that massive nuclear arsenals have nothing to do with this kind of victory.  Nuclear weapons cannot deter terrorists.  Instead they make us less secure by leaving more fissile material vulnerable to theft.  By reducing the size of global nuclear weapons stockpiles and securing nuclear materials, we can help prevent WMDs from falling into terrorist hands.

Since terrorism, and in particular nuclear terrorism, is the greatest threat to security today, we must orient our military to meet it.  That means putting less emphasis on building nuclear weapons and more emphasis on checking their spread.  In the war on terror we should not expect a perfect success-rate, neither should we expect no casualties.  But the days of full-scale land wars must end.  The bin Laden raid is an example of an effective use of force in the 21st century.

Of course, he was writing about the costly F-14 and F-15 programs. Little did he know that the F-35 would replace the F-15 decades down the road with a jaw-dropping unit cost of $133.6 million a plane and lifetime operating costs eyeballing the trillion dollar mark. Alas, Washington is about to make a spirited round of arguments about the F-35 that likely were already made in the 1970s over other airframes.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Below for your reading pleasure are a select few quotes from his chapter on warplane costs. The feeling upon reading the text should seem familiar to anyone who has heard an oldie tell them of the price of a hamburger in the 1950s. Enjoy.

The extent of the problem is easily illustrated. During the peak procurement year of World War II (1943) the Army Air Corp committed $2.47 billion to purchase tactical aircraft: fighters and light and medium bombers of a dozen popular types. For fiscal year 1975, the Air Force requested $1.07 billion to buy modern airplanes for the same tactical purposes. The difference is that in 1943 the Army got 24,847 airplanes for its money; this year the Air Force wants to buy 98.  The average cost of a tactical warplane procured in 1943 was $99,400. In 1975 it will be $10,900,000.

For those of you following at home, DoD requested $9.7 billion to purchase 32 F-35s in the FY 2012 budget.

Compared to other kinds of aircraft, the climb in unit costs for tactical warplanes appears less extraordinary, though even in this company the tactical air curve remains prominent, exceeded only by the growth for strategic bombers. (The B-1, if produced, will probably be at least 200 times as expensive as the heaviest bombers of World War II.)…

Whatever one’s position on the value of tactical air power, its appropriate claim on the finite resources available for national defense, or the mission capabilities it should seek to achieve, the upward trend in the unit cost of tactical aircraft and where it may be leading can only be cause for concern.

One quote of White is more tragically funny than others:

Rather than accept the risk of an abrupt confrontation a few years hence with a generation of aircraft that have priced themselves out of the weapons marke, as did the Army’s MBT-70, it seems wise to face the issue of unit costs squarely now by trying to identify what factors have caused the steep climb and by considering means of breaking free of the spiral.

The U.S. still seems locked in this spiral, with little hope of breaking free. Perhaps the budget belt-tightening currently in vogue will begin to restrain the escalating costs of major weapons systems. More likely, maybe 37 years down the road, someone will look back on this blog and say, “The more things change…”

A film by the academy-award winning producers of An Inconvenient Truth, Countdown is a compelling and eye-opening film. It explains in clear terms the nuclear threat we face and the global imperative of seeking the elimination of nuclear weapons.  It features interviews with Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pervez Musharraf, Tony Blair, and Ploughshares Fund’s own Joe Cirincione.

The film makes a frightening observation.  In the 21st century, an odd twist of fate has left us in a world where the threat of nuclear war has receded, but where the likelihood of a nuclear attack – by accident, miscalculation, or madness – has increased.  Thousands of nuclear missiles remain on hair-trigger alert around the globe and terrorists are seeking the means for nuclear destruction.  Given the complexity and unimagineable risks of this status quo, the film makes the case that going to zero is the best path to security.  Catch the trailer below.

In April 2009, President Obama made it the official policy of the United States to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Beginning with the Nuclear Posture Review and the Nuclear Security Summit, the United States led the way towards reducing the role the nuclear weapons play in national defense and securing loose and vulnerable nuclear materials around the world. The New START Treaty, signed between the United States and Russia, began the process of much needed bilateral arsenal reductions, and talks are ongoing for the next arms control treaty.

As Countdown to Zero illustrates, we cannot afford to lose this momentum and must continue to reduce global nuclear arsenals and lock down vulnerable nuclear materials to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. The film provides a powerful message about our security and delivers a rallying cry for the necessary global elimination of nuclear weapons.

So pick up some popcorn on the way home and tune in to The History Channel at 9:00 pm. You can also stream the film through Netflix. Either way, you need to see this movie.

“Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” said Barack Obama, barely two months into his presidency.

It was not a policy rooted in idealism or naiveté. Rather it recognized the concrete steps necessary to begin the long journey of persistent nuclear reductions and most importantly normalized the goal of nuclear zero for decades to come.

The Prague Agenda was laid out with four main objectives:

1. Reduce the total number and role that nuclear weapons play in the defense postures of nuclear-armed nations
2. Strengthen the international nonproliferation regime by holding rogue states accountable
3. Secure loose and vulnerable nuclear materials around the world while strengthening international cooperation on nuclear security
4. Support the safe and secure growth of nuclear power in ways that reduce the spread of dangerous technologies

Despite the well-known ups and downs of his tenure in office, President Obama has largely stuck to his nuclear principles and elevated the level of discussion around the long-sought vision of a nuclear weapon-free world. The vision, codified in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, preached by Ronald Reagan, endorsed by the Four Horsemen, and resurrected by Barack Obama, remains key to ensuring the safety and security of the United States.

Despite major successes like the Nuclear Posture Review, the Nuclear Security Summit, and the New START Treaty, much work remains to be done. Ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is necessary to stem the production of new nuclear weapons and limit dangerous and destabilizing posturing between nuclear states. The negotiation of a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty must move forward (with or without the Conference on Disarmament) to stop the flow of the dangerous ingredients for nuclear warheads. The United States and Russia must reach an agreement to cooperate on ballistic missile defense in order to build confidence for further reduction of nuclear weapons, both strategic and non-strategic. None of these tasks will easy and they are only the part of a larger plan, but the work is already underway.

It will be an uphill battle, no corners can be cut, and progress must often be made incrementally. Still, it is clear that the vision of a nuclear-free world is alive and well in 2011.

The reasons for such a policy have not changed in the last two years. Assessing the threat in 2009, Obama remarked: “Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.” Terrorists still seek to buy, build, or steal nuclear material and thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, threatening to be launched by accident, miscalculation, or madness.

We need not live under this shadow of nuclear annihilation much longer. Leadership and persistence on concrete policy goals can alter the course of history. As Obama concluded in Prague, “Human destiny will be what we make of it. Here, in Prague, let us honor our past by reaching for a better future. Let us bridge our divisions, build upon our hopes, and accept our responsibility to leave this world more prosperous and more peaceful than we found it.”

Two years hence the United States must continue to embrace the vision of a nuclear-free world. It is desirable, it is possible, and it is necessary.

On this timely anniversary, we should all sit down and read “Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons” by Paul Lettow.  Perhaps then we would understand that true story of Reagan’s SDI and how hyper-conservative missile defense hawks have abandoned both their history and sensible foreign policies.

Missile defense proponents, like Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), claim to be continuing Reagan’s legacy. “President Reagan fought to achieve peace through strength,” wrote DeMint in an op-ed on his blog, “And in doing so he led the U.S. to win the Cold War and put in place the beginnings of groundbreaking missile defense technology to protect our nation from rising threats. And ever since, the left has sought to stop, block, and defund our critical missile defenses that are continually proving to be successful and necessary.”  DeMint proposes an expensive, technically impossible, and potentially catastrophic plan to deploy hundreds of missiles around the world.

This is not at all what Reagan intended.

According to Lettow’s well-argued monograph, Reagan never let his mind stray from his ultimate goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.  SDI was intended as a necessary step forward in order to eventually draw down.  “I happen to believe,” wrote Reagan, “that an effective defense weapon could bring closer the day when we could all do away with the nuclear threat.”

Furthermore, Reagan stated: “In my opinion, if a defensive weapon could be found and developed that would reduce the utility of these [missiles] or maybe even make them obsolete… Then [the President] could offer to give that same defensive weapon to [our adversaries] to prove that there was no longer any need for keeping these missiles.  Or with that defense, he could then say to them, ‘I am willing to do away with my missiles.  You do away with yours.’”

As Lettow puts it, “From the very beginning, Reagan had in mind that SDI would catalyze the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and that sharing a missile defense with the adversaries of the United States would play a role in that process. “

Whether or not Reagan understood the instability that SDI would introduce into US-USSR relations or truly believed in its technological feasibility, he latched onto it as a policy goal that would transform the superpower dynamic.

Even just the idea of missile defense was useful for Reagan in encouraging the Soviet Union to come to the negotiating table.  The idea of SDI represented a new military strategy that could harness the strength of American innovation and leave the USSR in the dust technologically.  Wanting to avoid a military space race, the Soviet Union really had no choice but to try to make an agreement on arms control.

Reagan also understood that the purpose of missile defense is not to provide an impenetrable shield that makes fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills unnecessary.  Dreaming about an airtight seal around the United States is an exploitative misinterpretation of Reagan’s intentions and a blatant overestimation of the technical capabilities of missile defense.  For example, physicists estimate that the SM-3 Interceptor, which is crucial to U.S. missile defense plans, has a success-rate of about 20 percent.

Reagan instead sought defensive weapons as a step on the way to nuclear-zero. So, if we can manage to negotiate treaties that reduce nuclear arsenals without the need to spend billions of dollars on ineffective technologies, why not continue to reduce our stockpiles?

Reagan was working from the standpoint of a tense period in the Cold War.  In the 21^st century world, our leaders should recognize the ineffectiveness of introversion and advocating policies based on Cold War fears.  The problems of nuclear weapons in the modern era can only be solved collectively.  Building higher walls does nothing to make us safer when it comes to nuclear weapons, unless we cannot get to the table in the first place.  Reagan understood this principle, but his contemporary colleagues do not.