Guest Post: The Long Game of Nuclear Disarmament

by Cheryl Rofer

I’m hearing a certain amount of grousing that New START doesn’t take the numbers down enough. In one sense, that’s true. The United States and Russia will still have thousands of nuclear weapons, although once the reductions are in place, the numbers may go below ten thousand each, total, for the first time since the 1950s.

But nuclear disarmament is a long game, and it’s becoming clear that Barack Obama is quite willing to play the long game.

I think his long game on nuclear disarmament goes something like this: regularize nuclear disarmament talks with the Russians, get an initial success, move to some of the auxiliary problems, bring the allies along, move to deeper reductions. So far he’s got the first two, or will have when/if the Senate ratifies New Start.

The numbers in New START are low-hanging fruit, ripe for that initial success. It was essential to keep the verification measures of START I in place. Both Russia and the United States wanted that, with some modifications, so that was a likely success too. But the negotiations were primarily on verification, not numbers. Unfortunately, the numbers are easier to report. Verification is boring. So we will hear more about the numbers.

It’s nice to think that the move to a few hundred nuclear weapons could happen quickly, but in the world of Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, it ain’t going to happen. There are a couple of reasons for this: as the numbers get lower, the rules change, and the other nuclear powers need to be brought along.

Ain’t Nobody Goin’ to See Our Nukes!

That’s one of the primary rules of nuclear weapons classification. We have a general idea of how the Russians make their nuclear weapons, and they reciprocate. But there are some things both sides don’t know, and the more you know, the easier it would be to defeat those nukes or to make even better ones. Or so the argument goes.

In any case, the belief is real in government circles and was more so back in the 1970s. So, early on in arms control, counting delivery vehicles was a solution to that problem: each missile of a particular type represented so many warheads, each bomber, each submarine. The delivery vehicles were countable, and the warheads were hidden within. But when the number of warheads gets small enough, they must be counted individually. As must tactical nuclear weapons, the numbers being refurbished, and the parts stored. That’s why the Moscow Treaty limit of 2,200 strategic deployed warheads nets out to a total of ten thousand or so each for the United States and Russia.

That small number appears to be in the 500-1,000 total range. But the feeling is still strong that the other side shouldn’t know details of our warheads. At least two schemes for counting warheads without seeing them are being developed, one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and one by a European consortium.

This is an extremely sensitive area that is going to require a lot more negotiation. Even these schemes will be looked at with skepticism. Any of us who have talked to members of the other side have had a moment in which we realized “Ohhhhhh! That’s how you do that!” No classified information is exchanged, just hearing an easy assumption, an elision, a juxtaposition of two comments. Crossword puzzle fans know that it’s easier to find the answer if you have a couple of letters.

As the numbers go down to perhaps 500 total for each, the two big nuclear arsenals will look more like those of the other nuclear countries. Britain and France have something like 200 each (with Britain going down to 160 in the near future), China likely has between 200 and 300, Israel has about 200 but won’t talk about it, and India and Pakistan have 75-100 each. North Korea is an outlier, and we can assume that talks there will continue (or not) pretty much as they have been. Iran has no nukes.

So at some point, those countries must be brought into the game. Too early, and they’ll sit back with their arms folded and say “You first.” Britain has been a bit more active in disarmament, but France is sticking with what it’s got for now. China and Israel aren’t saying much, and India and Pakistan remain fixated on each other.

The Fissile Material Control Treaty

For the long game, the others are being brought into the negotiations through the Conference on Disarmament, where a Fissile Material Control Treaty is being considered, at the request of the United States. Pakistan is blocking action there much as the Republicans are blocking action in the Senate.

[BTW, the US Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament is a woman, too: Laura Kennedy. Just sayin’.]

An FMCT would specify that signatories would not manufacture fissile material for weapons. The United States and Russia ended production some time ago; Pakistan thinks it needs more, and that’s its objection at the Conference on Disarmament.

So why go for an FMCT, as Obama has promised to do, if we’re not making the stuff anyway? Just to beat up on the little guys, as Pakistan contends?

An FMCT would open up a new inspection regime for enriched uranium and plutonium. Procedures would be developed, and the world would become accustomed to the idea that fissionable material is accountable to international authority. The big guys object to applying such a treaty to material that’s already been manufactured, but as the numbers go down, something is going to have to be done with those pits stored at Pantex. Russia has been selling the United States enriched uranium from its decommissioned weapons to be blended down for reactor fuel. If you get your electricity from nuclear plants, some of it is from decommissioned Soviet weapons.

There’s no overall accountability, though, for these materials, and even a weak FMCT would be the first step toward accountability for everyone. It would further encourage the repurposing of weapons materials for civilian power generation. And it would give an early warning of suspicious production or stockpiling. It would be the complement that is needed to inspection of individual warheads: what happens to them after they’re gone.

I’ve wondered why Obama explicitly made an FMCT part of his plan, but an FMCT that went in this direction would be an essential part of a world without nukes.

Cheryl Rofer currently blogs at Phronesisaical, after a career that included research and practical experience in the nuclear fuel cycle, fossil fuel, lasers and environmental cleanup, including collaborations in Estonia and Kazakhstan.

Comments

[Marty]

Cheryl,

I have enjoyed both of your posts, informative, reasonably politics free. I have one question, do you include at least one, "just sayin" about a woman in a key position in every post?

I smiled when I read it in the first one. I was a little put off when I read it in the second one. I assume many of the talented people in key positions in our government are women.

If you had pointed out the the Ambassador was Laura Kennedy, with a link, I would have just gone to read it to find out more about her. The "just sayin" just seems out of character in such a serious and high quality post.

[Cheryl Rofer]

Serious and high quality. Sigh.

Perhaps I could have left out "just sayin'". I certainly would have if I were writing for a serious and high quality dead-tree journal in an attempt to become a member of the Very Serious People. I gave up on that some time ago; have an unfortunate tendency to giggle at the wrong moments.

I really, really like it, though, that the people who have done the hard work and made this happen have been women on the US side. And I'd like others to appreciate this.

I suspect that reactions to this (both the fact and my ways of saying it) are going to vary. I'm old enough that it's worth noting, more than once. Younger people have grown up in the world I fought for and so can be more casual about it, and that's good.

But still, too often, default is male.

So I'll apologize to those who found that comment inappropriate, but I'll probably keep doing such things.

[liberal japonicus]

It's interesting, I remember when Carla Hills was the head of the US delegation to Japan for trade talks, and the fact that the delegation was led by a woman really unbalanced the Japanese. In this 1988 piece by Clyde Farnsworth notes that the US employed more women as trade negotiators, and I'm wondering if that has carried over into arms negotiations. As the Farnsworth piece notes, officials who are (were?) not used to dealing with career women in their own country were/are taken aback when confronted with them as part of the US negotiating team.

[wj]

I can see where there might be some advantages (and, perhaps, some disadvantages) in having a woman heading our negotiating team when dealing with men from cultures where women are held in low esteem. And some of those we will be dealing with make the Japanese look really broad-minded on that front. Do your experiences speak to that?

[liberal japonicus]

I'm not sure and that's what I was trying to get at with my comment. It seemed to be a conscious strategy on the part of the US to utilize more women for trade negotiations precisely because for their unbalancing effect, but I'm wondering how (un)similar trade negotiations are to arms reductions negotiations. Also, one of the biggest targets in arms negotiations might be the North Koreans, and it is really hard to say what esteem they hold women, because you have a rhetoric of equality and shared sacrifice (Libya is another example of that, with Gaddhafi's attempts to push for female equality running into entrenched norms)

[Model 62]

I meant to mention this yesterday and I see Marty has more or less mentioned it, too: I've learned more about nuclear arms control from your last two ObiWi posts than I've learned from the last, er, bunch of years of mainstream media.

Thanks!

[Eric Martin]

Model 62,

There's a reason I invited Cheryl to post here ;)

[Jacob Davies]

Yeah, these are good posts. I very much agree with the idea that it's the verification that's the problem. You've got two continent-spanning superpowers, both with enormously effective secrecy regimes, both with a long history of paranoia especially regarding each other, both of whom have had nuclear weapons programs for 65 years. It is a near-certainty that both believe that the other maintains a secret reserve of weapons & delivery systems completely outside of even the normal (secret) record-keeping, and with each having an entire continent to hide them in, it will be extremely difficult to build the trust necessary to go to very low levels of weapons.

I think the best that can be hoped for in the next decade or two is very incremental progress like this. I think it's unrealistic to expect to go to zero weapons while grave ideological differences divide the major powers of the world, while small rogue states with the ability to develop nuclear weapons continue to exist completely outside of the constraints of the "international community", and until the UN shows some real ability to be an alternative for resolving serious conflicts between major powers.

To some extent I think that's not even a bad thing; or rather, the bad thing is the lack of all those other things to head off war, and not the nukes themselves. In a zero-nukes world where nuclear weapons are known to be possible, where various powers have previously possessed huge stockpiles, where the designs for bombs and for equipment for manufacturing bombs still exist (which they always will), where the raw materials for bombs remain part of the civilian power generation system, the threat of nuclear escalation will remain. And even if it that threat didn't exist, it is clear that warfare between major industrialized powers is quite capable of producing and delivering levels of destruction comparable to nuclear warfare, if over a longer period.

What ready-to-use nuclear weapons do is actualize and concentrate that destructive force into the first few hours of a major conflict. There can be no pretending that we can win, that a war between major industrial powers can remain constrained, that back on the home front things will be largely undisturbed. You can't pretend that when hundreds of nuclear missiles are ready to be launched at the cities of your nation.

Of course this is insane, but I try to keep in mind that the situation in the pre-nuclear world was no less insane. Nations embarked on disastrous wars with other industrial nations even after the wars of the 19th century, even after WWI. People are somewhat insane, and eager to be persuaded that the next war can be won without devastation. To me there is no question that there would have been further WWII-scale wars throughout the 20th century without the nuclear standoff.

But: even in their role as instantaneous actualizers of the destructive power of warfare, we don't need tens of thousands of warheads, and having that many has its own problems - keeping control, the cost, retaining extensive maintenance and remanufacturing facilities, etc. But I think there is a lower limit while those constraints on non-violent resolution of international conflicts remain and while those difficulties in verification remain. I think the US & Russia could go to 500 ready-to-deliver warheads each and save a lot of money and reduce the risk of losing control of any of them. I can't think of a way down from there that doesn't bring its own set of major risks (and by that I mean just as much the risk that the US will do something stupid as that Russia would do... or perhaps more so, since the US today is much more oriented towards ideologically-based interventionism.)

500 would also bring us close to China's capability, which is a much more serious concern for this century than Russia. It would preempt a "catch-up" arms race from China. And I think it's possible that we'll feel that a world where a dozen powers have well-controlled stockpiles of a few hundred weapons is safer and more peaceful than one with two superpowers each with tens of thousands of weapons.

[Cheryl Rofer]

Jacob Davies: The game changes even more at 500 (or 300 or 200 or something in that range). That's the long, long game. I don't see the path after that either.

But once we get there, we will have a history of building trust through negotiations and verification, and all the nuclear weapons-holders will be players. It will be a very different world from today's.

And the paths will become clearer. They will probably involve conventional weapons as well, and other moves that make war less likely overall.

[liberal japonicus]

You've got two continent-spanning superpowers, both with enormously effective secrecy regimes, both with a long history of paranoia especially regarding each other, both of whom have had nuclear weapons programs for 65 years. It is a near-certainty that both believe that the other maintains a secret reserve of weapons & delivery systems completely outside of even the normal (secret) record-keeping, and with each having an entire continent to hide them in, it will be extremely difficult to build the trust necessary to go to very low levels of weapons.

Actually, those regimes can, counter intuitively, provide the mechanism to move forward. I remember reading that during one round of nuclear arms reduction, the Russians would, when decommissioning certain elements from the nuclear sub fleet, would place the disassembled and now unusable parts out on the dock. This is because it would allow the US spy satellites to photograph them. We actually had a pretty good idea of the military capacities of the Soviet Union and it was only with the 'B team' that things got out of whack. I suppose there is no way to prevent a paranoiac strain from emerging again, but hopefully, we'll be able to remember the last mistake for a decade or two.

[Jacob Davies]

Same with the B-52s being cut up and left in the desert. That's practical when you are demonstrating a major reduction from a high level, but I think when you get down to those last few hundred delivery systems it's going to be a slightly different story and a different, and deeper, kind of verification is going to be needed.

The FMCT will be part of that. Reactors are not as easy to hide as warheads.

[Randy Castleberry]

She gets to play with nukes and lasers in far flung parts of the world? Cool! Seriously, for being someone who helped clean up a lot of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you have my thanks. I have a friend who got to do something similar, and it's vital work.

[Slartibartfast]

Same with the B-52s being cut up and left in the desert.

Eh? B-52s are still deployed. Sure, there are dinosaurs at Davis Monthan, but there are spares versions of lots of things there.