Foreign Policy In Focus

Hot on the heels of the development of nuclear weapons, strategies for dealing with them -- bad pun alert! -- mushroomed. Much of it emanated from the RAND Corporation, home to, as Fred Kaplan explained in The Wizards of Armageddon (Touchstone, 1983) "a small and exceptionally inbred collection of men -- mostly economists and mathematicians, a few political scientists -- who devoted nearly every moment of their workaday thoughts to thinking about the bomb: how to prevent nuclear war, how to fight nuclear war if it cannot be deterred."

Specific subjects included fun stuff like first and second strikes, the always popular mutual assured destruction (MAD), launch on warning, and, finally, targeting cities versus targeting "counterforce" (the enemy's nuclear weapons).

Daunting as that sounds, some of the concepts are deceptively simple. Or, to put it another way, they started out simple, but were worried to death in think tanks and other institutions. For example, the term deterrence, when used in international relations, just means using the threat of an attack to compel a foe to either act or refrain from acting in accordance with the deterring state's wishes. Yet, applied to nuclear weapons, deterrence has spawned countless books, papers, and conferences.

An arms race, of course, is the principal component of deterrence: each side tries to stockpile weapons more advanced than those of its designated enemy to keep it from attacking. In the field of nuclear weapons, the arms race manifested itself as, for example, development of first, the atomic bomb, then, the exponentially more powerful hydrogen bomb; first, bombers, then intercontinental missiles.

The second element of an arms race besides maintaining a development edge over one's enemy is building more weapons. Human nature, right? When it comes to nuclear weapons, one assumes that the perceived need to go forth and multiply is determined by how many weapons the enemy has. In fact, it's more dependent on the number of your enemy's targets. In the January/February issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ivan Oelrich explained how this works (behind a pay wall).

Nuclear weapons were first aimed at cities, the centers of population and industrial production. This targeting strategy was, in part, a natural extrapolation of the mass city bombing tactics of World War II. But cities also became nuclear targets by default; with the very inaccurate early missiles, cities were the only targets big enough to hit. As accuracy, weapon numbers, and intelligence on enemy-weapon location increased, it was irresistible for both sides to target the enemy’s nuclear weapons. … The targeting of weapons inevitably led to an arms race. If cities were the only targets, then neither side needed more weapons than the other side had cities to shoot at. But once nuclear weapons became targets, each side had to have as many weapons as the other side for counterforce attacks, plus more to shoot at “value” targets like cities. When each side needed just a few more than the other, an arms race without end was on. [Emphasis added.]

One's first impression is that attacking weapons is significantly less barbaric than attacking population centers. Alas, in practice, it doesn't work that way. In its counterintuitiveness, switching a nation's nuclear weapons policy away from counterforce parallels missile defense. In the first, you're restraining yourself from taking away your enemy's weapons. In the second, you surrender the ability to shoot down attacking warheads to keep from inciting your enemy to make more to both overwhelm your missile defense and mount a second attack if the first is thwarted.  

That's part of what makes nuclear races so lethal: the field is fraught with seeming Sophie's Choices like that.

Cross-posted from the Project on Government Oversight Blog.

We've been saying for some time that the U.S. nuclear weapons complex is a relic of the Cold War. Now it seems even the Department of Defense (DoD) has had enough, according to a Pentagon memo obtained by POGO, and is calling out the Department of Energy (DOE) for its refusal to downsize its nuclear weapons laboratories. POGO sent a letter to Members of Congress today—along with a copy of the leaked DoD memo—urging them to ensure that DOE does not circumvent the congressional funding process and pour even more money into its oversized lab system. We also urged DOE to follow DoD’s lead by closing redundant lab space and by placing a cap on contractor compensation at the labs.

The DoD memo appears to have been written in response to a new interagency council comprised of DOE, DoD, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The council is looking for ways “to engage in interagency long-term strategic planning” for the DOE labs. Simply put, the interagency council could create new missions for the nuclear weapons labs and could allow the agencies to funnel funding into DOE nuclear projects without congressional approval.

But, at a time when President Obama is calling for a “leaner” military and the Administration is considering shrinking the nuclear stockpile to reflect the realities of the 21st century, DOE nuclear labs should be getting smaller too.

As the DoD memo notes, experts have been urging DOE to downsize its labs (including the three nuclear weapons laboratories) since the end of the Cold War. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy concluded in 1995, “the DOE laboratory system is bigger and more expensive than it needs to be,” and there is “excessive duplication of capabilities among the labs.”

However, funding for the labs now exceeds Cold War levels, due in part to lobbying by the DOE lab directors. According to the DoD memo, the Administration’s plans to increase funding to $8.6 billion per year over the next ten years is almost 70 percent higher than spending during the Cold War in constant dollars. In another leaked memo obtained by POGO, an official from the Office of the Secretary of Defense noted that the DOE labs want to take on new missions as a way to justify their oversized infrastructure.

By contrast, the DoD has undertaken five Base Realignment and Closure rounds, or BRACs, since 1988, closing 21 laboratories and eliminating excess capacity. This past November, a DOE Office of Inspector General report concluded that DOE should carry out a BRAC-like review of its labs, which could lead to consolidation or realignment—which are ultimately money-savers for the labs and for taxpayers.

And, as we point out in the letter, taxpayers are footing a hefty bill for the labs. Seven of the top fifteen officials at the three nuclear weapons labs make more than the Administration’s $700,000 executive compensation cap. In theory, any amount above the compensation cap shouldn’t be a burden on taxpayers, as the labs are required to pay for the difference out of their own profits. However, because the labs use their government-granted award fees to pay the difference, taxpayers end up picking up the slack. For instance, in 2009, taxpayer dollars covered all of former Sandia Lab Director Tom Hunter’s $1.7-million salary.

What’s more, the DOE is clearly resistant to transparency, keeping under wraps the justification for the labs’ award fees. Since, 2009, the department has denied the public timely access to its revealing Performance Evaluation Plans (PEPs) and Performance Evaluation Reports (PERs), which POGO called “perhaps the single most important information available to hold NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration] accountable” in a letter to President Obama. We’ve only been able to see recent PERs due to the efforts of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the NNSA for access to the documents.

Congress needs to step in. POGO echoes the call of other experts who believe the DOE must reevaluate its oversized, outdated lab system. Instead of giving the DOE lab complex a blank check to continue to grow, it's time to end the bloat.

Mia Steinle is an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight.

If you watch crime shows on television or read crime fiction, you're no doubt familiar with the term "tune him up." It's defined at Urban Dictionary as: "A beat down especially when administered by the cops." Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but what seems implied is that the victimizer-turned-victim is being "tenderized" to make him more amenable to questioning and admitting to his guilt (lack thereof notwithstanding).

At IPS News, Gareth Porter writes (emphasis added):

In a blog post in The National Interest, Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, wrote that the "Western message to Tehran" seems to be, "(W)e might be willing to tolerate some sort of Iranian nuclear program, but only one consisting of facilities that would suffer significant damage if we or the Israelis later decide to bomb it." 

Greg Thielmann, senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, said in an interview with IPS, "There are Americans who believe it is important to keep all Iranian facilities at risk in case Tehran decided to build a nuclear weapon [but that] is more an interest of the Israelis than of the United States". 

The Iranian facility that Israeli is most interested in keeping at risk is Fordow, the underground uranium facility near the city of Qom. Porter again.

Reza Marashi, the former State Department specialist on Iran and now research director at the National Iranian-American Council, said … the Israelis who have "turned their inability to destroy Fordow into a major issue". 

But (emphasis added again) …

While the demand on Fordow clearly responds to a U.S. need to accommodate Israel, it is also in line with Obama administration efforts to intimidate Iran by emphasising that it has only a limited time "window" in which to solve the issue diplomatically [before Israel decides to] strike Iran's nuclear facilities in the absence of progress toward an agreement guaranteeing Iran would not go nuclear. 

In other words, the United States is letting Israel "tune up" Iran with threats in hopes that Iran will agree to the United States and the P5 +1's points in negotiations. (In Istanbul on April 14, relations were cordial, lending cautious optimism to the next meeting in Baghadad on May 23.) Besides, Tehran, it's for your own good because otherwise we'll be unable to prevent our henchman, Israel, from unleashing the full force of its fury on you.

Allow us, now, to return to the assertions that we "might be willing to tolerate some sort of Iranian nuclear program, but only one consisting of facilities that would suffer significant damage if we or the Israelis later decide to bomb it" and "it is important to keep all Iranian facilities at risk in case Tehran decided to build a nuclear weapon."

How, you may be asking yourself, can one expect a state to agree to purposely leave itself vulnerable? Odd as it sounds, it's not unprecedented. Missile defense is infused with the same line of, if not magical, wishful thinking. It works like this: conventional thinking on nuclear strategy holds that missile defense upsets -- "destabilizes" -- the whole nuclear-deterrence apple cart. Russia, for example, is considered vulnerable to an initial nuclear strike by the United States, during which many of its nuclear weapons in land-based silos would be wiped out. Also, many of those launched at the United States would be destroyed while in the air by U.S. missile defense (in our dreams: our missile defense systems are years -- decades even -- from that kind of capability).

Anyway, the crux of this theory is that since Russia knows that under this arrangement it's going to lose missiles both on the ground and in the air, it's motivated to build more to compensate. In other words, the United States would be safer if it refrained from implementing missile defense and maintained a calculated vulnerability. (I've elaborated on this elsewhere.)

Israel wants Fordow less fortified against attack -- to come complete, as it were, with a self-destruct button. Meanwhile, the United States is turning Fordow into a self-destruct bottom for the negotiations. At PBS Frontline Tehran Bureau, Muhammad Sahimi writes that in an interview, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:

The way to confront this strategy of Iran's [stalling and exploiting divisions among its adversaries] is to demand explicit conditions calling for ceasing all uranium enrichment, removal of all enrich[ed] uranium from the country, and its exchange for material which cannot be [used to] develop nuclear weapons, and agreement to give up the underground facility in Qom [the Fordow site].

But assuming that [this] accurately reflects the Obama administration's goals and demands … they will be non-starters and will doom the negotiations before they even get under way.

Because …

Iran built the Fordow uranium enrichment site precisely to have a fallback facility if its other sites, such as those in Natanz, Isfahan, and Arak, are attacked and destroyed. The site is effectively indestructible at present.

In fact, though, it may be much adieu about nothing.

… even though the prowar factions in the United States and elsewhere still refer to it as a "secret site." … most Western media reports fail to inform the public … that the site is also monitored and safeguarded by the IAEA. I cannot imagine any scenario under which Iran, and in particular the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the state's most powerful organ, will agree to dismantle Fordow.

In other words, it's as if by including the Fordow proviso, the United States and the P5+1 are intentionally sabotaging the negotiations.

Cross-posted from Other Words.

Indonesia ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) late last year. As the most recent nation to pledge to halt nuclear weapons testing and agree to global monitoring to ensure compliance with that promise, it brought the total number of signatories to 157.

Almost all the world's governments have agreed to take this first solid step towards eliminating the terrible threat of nuclear warfare. If you don't test these weapons, they're much more difficult to develop, build, and rely on.

As Washington threatens to go to war to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, you'd think we'd be card-carrying members of the CTBT club, along with Israel. Not so.

Although the United Nations approved the treaty more than 15 years ago, our own government hasn't signed on yet.

The United States is the godfather in a gang of eight nuclear bomb test ban holdouts. Together, they hold the rest of the world hostage to their desire to wield the ultimate destructive power. Who are the other atomic bomb-lovers? Israel, Iran, China, Egypt, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. These are strange bedfellows. All eight spoiler countries must ratify the treaty before it can be enforced.

Proponents of nuclear weapons argue that mutually assured destruction can act as a guarantor of peace. But in the end, relying on the power to destroy and threaten ensures that none of us on this planet can ever fully trust each other, nor re-invest in more creative ways to resolve conflicts. At the most fundamental level, trust in massively destructive weapons replaces trust in God.

The United States, as the world's undisputed nuclear weapons superpower, has to lead by example on the path to faith and democracy. Saber rattling at the fledgling super-bomb efforts of Iran and North Korea while ignoring our own stockpiles won't convince anyone.

Work and pray to end the nuclear weapons curse.

Michael McCarthy is a leader of Blue Water Pax Christi, a Catholic peace organization.

The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) refers to itself as a "non-partisan institution that focuses on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons." But it's sometimes demonstrated a tendency to lean toward, if not the right, the alarmist about nuclear proliferation. As late as 2002, its "ubiquitous" president David Albright, oft quoted in print and on television, issued nuclear warnings about Iraq. In January of this year, Albright and the ISIS staff published a report titled Reality Check: Shorter and Shorter Timeframe if Iran Decides to Make Nuclear Weapons.

ISIS also endorsed the unconvincing story that Iran built an explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon and carry out a simulated nuclear explosion (the Danilenko affair, if you will). Albright told Toby Warrick of the Washington Post in November of last year:

"It remains for Danilenko to explain his assistance to Iran. … At the very least, Danilenko should have known exactly why the Iranians were interested in his research and expertise. The IAEA information suggests he has provided more than he has admitted."

Investigative journalist Gareth Porter, among others, debunked that story. One can't help but wonder if the direction ISIS takes has, at times, been determined by its funding, which runs the gamut from the Ploughshares Fund to the Rockefeller Foundation to the extremely conservative Smith Richardson Foundation. Still, ISIS is quick to admit mistakes, if not always learn from them.

In his latest piece for Inter Press Service Alleged Photos of "Clean-up" at Iran's Parchin Site Lack Credibility, Gareth Porter provides an example of how a stance ISIS takes plays into hawks' hands (er, talons).

ISIS Executive Director David Albright told interviewer Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio in July 2009 that he had "gotten a tip" in September 2004 that high explosives testing at Parchin "could be used for nuclear weapons". 

ISIS then published a series of satellite photographs that the organisation said were "consistent" with facilities for such nuclear testing. 

The satellite images were then cited by Undersecretary of State John Bolton as alarming evidence of covert Iranian nuclear weapons work. … But Bolton and the IAEA had only vague suspicions rather than hard intelligence to go on.

Nevertheless:

The United States and its Western allies put strong pressure on the IAEA to get Iran to agree to a visit to Parchin.

More recently, writes Porter

News stories about satellite photographs suggesting efforts by Iran to "sanitise" [Parchin] … have added yet another layer to widely held suspicion that Iran must indeed be hiding a covert nuclear weapons programme.

But the story is suspect, in part because it is based on evidence that could only be ambiguous, at best. The claim does not reflect U.S. intelligence, and a prominent think tank that has published satellite photography related to past controversies surrounding Iran's nuclear programme has not found any photographs supporting it. 

That prominent think tank, this time demonstrating caution about drawing damning conclusions about Iran, is none other than ISIS. Porter again:

Paul Brannan, a specialist on interpretation of satellite photography for ISIS, told the New York Times that. … he could not find any photographs of sites at Parchin that suggested clean-up. He told the Times. … "There is no way to know whether or not the activity you see in a particular satellite image is cleansing or just regular work." Brannan added, "There's a lot of activity there – always." 

Perhaps ISIS is responding to increasing reluctance on the part of the Obama administration, and even many in Israel, to refrain from attacking Iran. If only we had confidence that ISIS -- and the International Atomic Agency, as well -- speak without first licking their fingers and testing the political winds.

Hold the presses -- this just in (as they say), from Haaretz:

A U.S. non-proliferation expert said on Tuesday he has identified a building at the Parchin military site in Iran suspected of containing, currently or previously, a high-explosive test chamber the UN nuclear watchdog wants to visit.

David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, said he studied commercial satellite imagery and found a building located on a relatively small and isolated compound at Parchin that fit a description in the November 2011 International Atomic Energy Agency report.